"Threads" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... left. It had been wrought, as was easy to perceive, with wonderful skill of needlework; and the stitch (as I am assured by ladies conversant with such mysteries) gives evidence of a now forgotten art, not to be discovered even by the process of picking out the threads. This rag of scarlet cloth—for time, and wear, and a sacrilegious moth had reduced it to little other than a rag—on careful examination, assumed ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... rest here, brother! and within the veil Boldly thine anchor cast. What though thy boat No shoreland sees, but undulates afloat On soundless depths; securely fold thy sail. Ah! not by daring prow and favoring gale Man threads the gulfs of doubting and despond, And gains a rest in being unbeyond, Who roams the furthest, surest is to fail; Knowing nor what to seek, nor how to find. Not far but near, about us, yea within, Lieth the infinite ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... of considerable thickness, technically over one inch in circumference. Ropes are made of hemp, manila, flax, cotton or other vegetable fiber or of iron, steel or other metallic wire. A rope is sometimes called a line. They are composed of threads which are spun or twisted into strands and the finished ropes have special names, according to the number of the strands, and the various sizes are indicated by ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... rough and a polished piece of the same block of stone. He used some striking illustrations of the effect of light and the position of the eye upon colors. "Thus the color of plush or velvet will appear various if you stroke part of it one way and part another, the posture of the particular threads in regard to the light, or the eye, being thereby varied. And 'tis observable that in a field of ripe corn, blown upon by the wind, there will appear waves of a color different from that of the rest of the corn, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Neo-Platonists is Plotinus. His comprehensive mind gathered up the main threads of Alexandrian thought, and wove them into the fabric of a vast speculative system. The system is as much a religion as a philosophy. It is the triumph of uncompromising monism. The last traces of dualism have been eradicated. God, for Plotinus, is true being and the only being. He is ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... all the waste material of follies and vice and built upon a substantial foundation of honest manhood and sterling character? If not, you are a failure. However, chords that are broken may vibrate once more; take up the angled threads again and weave another pattern. The book that will always be the best and safest guide for weaving life's pattern is the Bible,—the truest and best friend any young man can have. If you want oratory, you need not talk about Demosthenes walking along the shores of ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... that period of faith and stone-cutting. What was done then might be beautiful, but the life was monotonous; she insisted that it was Huguenot; harsh, nasal, sombre, insolent, self-sufficient. Her eyes lightened for the flashing colours and pageantries, and the threads of desperate adventure crossing the Rii to this and that palace-door and balcony, like faint blood-streaks; the times of Venice in full flower. She reasoned against the hard eloquent Englishman of the books. 'But we are known by our fruits, are ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... While Homer paints for us the warlike life of his day, Hesiod paints the peaceful labors of the husbandman, the holiness of domestic life, the duty of economy, the education of youth, and the details of commerce and politics. He also collects the flying threads of mythological legend and lays down for us the story of the gods in a work of great value as the earliest exposition of this picturesque phase of religious belief. The veil is lifted from the face of youthful Greece by these two famous ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... serves especially for the preparation and wrapping of masks and amulets. Its manufacture is simple: a man walks through the woods with a split bamboo, and catches all the innumerable spider-webs hanging on the trees. As the spider-web is sticky, the threads cling together, and after a while a thick fabric is formed, in the shape of a conical tube, which is very solid and defies mould and rot. At the back of the house, there stood five hollow trunks, with bamboos leading into them. Through these, the men howl into the trunk, which reverberates ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... odds and ends of lace, so much lace of all kinds, and such a tangle of threads, strings, tapes and almost everything that could snarl up, was dragged out by Madaline from a work box, that she jammed the whole mass back in despair. "She won't need any of that," Cleo decided, "and I guess some new sewing stuff ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... other wild fowl, which birds were promptly skinned, my wife and I having in view a little amateur tailoring which should render my future interviews with the girls a little less embarrassing. As a matter of fact, I handed over the bird-skins to Yamba, and she, with her bone needles and threads of kangaroo sinews, soon made a couple of extraordinary but most serviceable garments, which we immediately took back to the poor girls, who were shivering with cold and neglect. I at once saw the reason ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... made in the same manner, only using half the quantity of vitriol. For woollen goods, the East indigo will answer as well as the Spanish, and comes much lower. This dye will not answer for cotton goods, as the vitriol rots the threads. Wash the articles that are to be dyed till perfectly clean, and free from color. If you cannot extract the color by rubbing it in hot suds, boil it out—rinse it in soft water, till entirely free from soap, as the soap ...
— The American Housewife • Anonymous
... not answer, for she was thinking of the strange threads one finds in the weft of human life. Every one follows a thread, but whither do the threads lead? Into what design? And while Evelyn was thinking the Prioress told how the house in which they were now living had been bought with five thousand out of the thirty thousand pounds which this girl had ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... thinking in my early youth in the most serious way. I felt that posterity had done much for its forefathers. It had given them an infinite horizon for the future beyond the bounds of their daily effort. We must in the child see the new fate of the human race; we must carefully treat the fine threads in the child's soul because these are the threads that one day will form the woof of world events. We must realise that every pebble by which one breaks into the glassy depths of the child's soul will extend ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... case the remainder of the features will also be superimposed nearly enough. These pinholes correspond to what are technically known to printers as "register marks." They are easily made: A slip of brass or card has an aperture cut out of its middle, and threads are stretched from opposite sides, making a cross.[22] Two small holes are drilled in the plate, one on either side of the aperture. The slip of brass is laid on the portrait with the aperture over its face. It is turned about until one of the cross ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... upon a withered elm, with his face towards Alt Waldnitz, that all the village, old and young, might see; and then to the beat of drum and scream of fife they marched away; and forest-hidden Waldnitz gathered up once more its many threads of quiet life and ...
— The Love of Ulrich Nebendahl • Jerome K. Jerome
... such definite and typical forms becomes realized, it further becomes clear that the vaguer manifestations of such symbolism are exceedingly widespread. When in a previous volume we were discussing and drawing together the various threads which unite "Love and Pain," it will now be understood that we were standing throughout on the threshold of erotic symbolism. Pain itself, in the sense in which we slowly learned to define it in this relationship—as a state of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... during which she must put up with this man's society; as if each moment were another inch torn in the rags of disillusionment which had got to be destroyed thoroughly before she could ever hope to gather up the broken threads ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... ends for me, Peggy, please?" she requested. "When I do it, the threads fall off, and the ends come loose. I want it to be specially nice ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... could always lie across his life. Whatever tragical event had occurred belonged to the past—surely the future might hold some alleviation, some happiness that might compensate for the sorrow that had lined his face and brought the silver threads that gleamed in his thick dark hair. Surely in the care for another life memory might be dulled and there might dawn for him a new hope, a new peace. Despite his broken suggestive words her trust in him was still maintained; she had no fear for Gillian—with him her future would be ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... afterward interpreted as generally exempting their society from the operation of this decree. Another decree enjoined sobriety and moderation in the use of the ecclesiastical penalty of excommunication. For the rest, all possible expedition was used in gathering up the threads of the work done or attempted by the council. The determination of the Index, as well as the revision of missal, breviary, ritual, and catechism, was remitted to the Pope. Then the decrees debated in the last session and at its adjourned meeting were adopted, being subscribed by 234 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... endless waste, with its vast star-fired mantle, were but atoms. He prayed for mercy to a woman—for happiness to her child. Both mother and daughter were close to him then. Time and distance were annihilated. He had faith—he saw into the future. The fateful threads of the past, so inextricably woven with his error, wound out their tragic length here ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... fate was spun, and men who thought they were directing the destiny of the world were merely caught in those woven threads like puppets tied to strings and made to dance. It was the old Dance of Death which has happened before in ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... very high order. Its plot is intricate and original, and the denouement startlingly tragic. In the course of the story, the chief clue of which is love, woven in with intrigue, ambition, wealth, poverty, and other threads of human life, there occur no fewer than over four hundred characters, each one possessed of a distinctive personality drawn with marvellous skill. It contains incidents which recall the licence tolerated ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... that evening was to linger long in Bert's memory. A red fire spluttered and blazed close by the electricians at their work, and red gleams xan up the vertical steel mast and threads of copper wire towards the zenith. The Prince sat on a rock close by, with his chin on his hand, waiting. Beyond and to the northward was the cairn that covered Von Winterfeld, surmounted by a cross of steel, and from among the tumbled rocks in the distance the eyes of a wolf gleamed redly. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... difficulties as well as dangers to be encountered. The native courage of the man must be tempered, ground and polished. On land it is the massing of numbers that accomplishes the result—the accumulation of vital forces and intelligence upon the objective point. The innumerable threads of individual enterprise, like the twist of a Manton barrel, give the toughest tensile power. Under the sea, however, it is often the strength of the single thread, the wit of the individual pitted against the solid impregnability of the elements, the vis inertiae of the sea. It looks ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... visited her on state occasions—a victory gained over the Pisans or Florentines—the conquest of a rebellious city, Pistoia perhaps—the birth of a son; or—the anniversary of national festivals. Pale-blue satin stuffs and delicate brocades, crossed with what was once glittering threads of gold, cover the walls. Rows of Venetian-glass chandeliers, tinted in every shade of loveliest color, fashioned into colored knots, pendants, and flowers, hang from the painted rafters. Mirrors, set in ponderous frames of old Florentine gilding, ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... on its application to man, one sees that the race must represent an immense network of lines of descent, running back through a vast number of different forms of gradually diminishing specialization, until it comes to a point where all its threads merge in one knot—the single cell with which it may be supposed that life on this globe began. Each individual is not only figuratively, but in a very literal sense, the carrier of the heritage of the whole race—of ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... here," Will went on, "do you see these threads hanging to the teeth of the saw? Do ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... requirements call for so many different types of bagging that it is not surprising to find all kinds of fibres used for this purpose. Most bagging is now made from yarns of the jute fibre. The cloth is, in general, woven with the plain weave, and the warp threads run in pairs, but large quantities of bags are made from cloths with single warp threads. In both cases the weave used for the cloth is that shown at A in the figure, but when double threads of warp are used, the arrangement ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... possibly where the threads join and this little game begins. Or perhaps it may really be said to begin again where Shorty, the chemist, died, and the celebrated Spofford mystery ended—eh, doctor? Look here, Captain, look here, Mr. Narkom, you remember what I told you this morning about that case ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... so low on the water that the bullets, being aimed at the walls of the fort, passed over our heads. As it was they did great damage to the rigging. The main topmast was shot away, the shrouds were torn to threads, and the gaff of the fore-topsail was badly wounded. Luckily for us the next vessel of the squadron had discharged its broadside just before we came into the line of fire, and the third merely signalled to know if we would surrender. Old Muzzy refused to answer the ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... smiled affably as the ready lies slipped smoothly from his lips. He was amusing himself immensely with the threads of the fairy ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... herself lightly on the arm of a chair; and now leaned a little forward, her lips just parted in the eagerness of anticipation. A turquoise medallion on a fine gold chain made a single incident of colour on the habitual ivory tint of her gown; threads of burnished copper glinted among the coils of her hair; and the loyal loving soul of her shone like a light through the seriousness ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... new girl, but tired and moist, appeared, took a hank of white threads from a dressing-table, and tied that separate lock firmly. This, Linda counted, was repeated fifteen times; and when it was accomplished she was unable to repress a nervous laughter. Really, her mother looked too queer for words: the long rigid projections stood out all over her head like—like ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... seem to have beset the interpreters of Plato in this matter. First, they have endeavoured to hang the dialogues upon one another by the slightest threads; and have thus been led to opposite and contradictory assertions respecting their order and sequence. The mantle of Schleiermacher has descended upon his successors, who have applied his method with the most various ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... once, and then her womanly pity and sense of duty gained the mastery. Vinton Arnold was now a dying man, and she but a trained nurse. Perhaps God's hand was in their strange and unexpected meeting, and it was His will that the threads of two lives that had been bound so closely should not be severed in fatal evil. Should she thwart ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... She waited, and when again they took up tangled threads of their adventure it was scarcely possible either would allow any ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... me and around, In part still shrouded by the soil, A stony chaos strews the ground, Where patient students delve and toil To bring to light Time's buried spoil, And History's tangled threads uncoil. ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... Other threads were weaving themselves into the "sad-colored" web of daily life, the pattern taking on new aspects as the days went on. Four years after the landing of the Arbella and her consorts, one of the many bands of Separatists, who followed ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... laying out the parts of this course the natural interests and capacities of children in their successive periods of growth must be taken into the reckoning. When a course of study has been laid out on this basis, bringing the three great threads or cables of human knowledge into proper juxtaposition at the various points, we shall be ready to speak of the manner of really executing ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... 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
... small nets should be made of fine Phasian or Carthaginian (3) flax, and so too should the road nets and the larger hayes. (4) These small nets should be nine-threaded (made of three strandes, and each strand of three threads), (5) five spans (6) in depth, (7) and two palms (8) at the nooses or pockets. (9) There should be no knots in the cords that run round, which should be so inserted as to run quite smoothly. (10) The road net should be twelve-threaded, ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... to be going on swimmingly for Mino, when he found himself attacked in the rear by two treacherous manikins, who had stolen upon him from behind, through the lattice-work of the cage. Quick as lightning the Mino turned to repel this assault, but all too late; two slender quivering threads of steel crossed in his poor body, and he staggered into a corner of the cage. His white eyes closed, then opened; a shiver passed over his body, beginning at his shoulder-tips and dying off in the extreme tips of the wings; he gasped as if for air, and then, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... of Cooperstown know a favorite summer walk that passes from the village up the hill on the eastern border of the lake, rises beyond Prospect Rock, winds over a wooded summit, descends, turns westerly through a shady grove, crosses a farm, then threads a stretch of densest foliage, when suddenly one emerges upon a clearing, and unexpectedly beholds, glittering far below, the waters of the Glimmerglass, with the homes and spires of the village gleaming amidst the ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... the malevolence of the evil spirits and for healing the sick. Pure or "holy" water and the number seven were regarded as endowed with mysterious power in the performance of these magical rites; thus magical threads were ordered to be bound seven times round the limbs of the sick man, with phylacteries attached to them on which were inscribed "sentences ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... dead roses, a sufficiently harmless occupation, one would have thought: a trifle thinner, a trifle paler than when he came: and were those grey threads ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... thus everything arises here from the Indestructible.'—But, it may be objected, men and spiders which are here quoted as parallel instances are of intelligent nature.—No, the purvapakshin replies; for the intelligent being as such is not the source of the threads and the hair, but everybody knows that the non-intelligent body of the spider ruled by intelligence is the source of the threads; and so in the case of man also.—While, moreover, in the case of the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... lovely child. She had a beautiful head and face, and a figure exquisitely molded. Her smiles were like sunshine; her hair had in it threads of gold; her eyes were of the deep blue that one sees in summer. It was not only her great loveliness, but there was about her a wonderful charm, a fascination, ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... ducks waddled hurriedly down to the river through the primroses under the hedge. He could hear the milkmaids calling in the meadows; and when he trundled slowly home the smoke was creeping up in pale-blue threads from the draught-holes in ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... the bank of my pond. Straight before me there were glimpses through the pointed leaves of the willows of its broad surface with threads of fluffy mist clinging here and there upon it. To the right a field of rye shone dimly; on the left stood up my orchard trees, tall, rigid, drenched it seemed in dew ... The breath of the morning was already upon them. Across the pure grey sky ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... the upshot of which he does not always feel exactly confident. But the Douglas, with his denser body, leaps and glides in hidden strength, seemingly as independent of common muscles as a mountain stream. He threads the tasseled branches of the pines, stirring their needles like a rustling breeze; now shooting across openings in arrowy lines; now launching in curves, glinting deftly from side to side in sudden zigzags, and swirling in ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... autumn and early winter you would admire the Traveller's Joy as much as you do now. The flowers will certainly be gone, but each seed which takes the place of a blossom will have a little plume of silky white threads attached to it—a sort of feathery tail. These serve as wings by which the seeds are often carried long distances by the wind. The seeds of some other plants which we shall see have ...
— Wildflowers of the Farm • Arthur Owens Cooke
... (May, 1861) contrasts Motley with Froude somewhat in the way in which another critic had contrasted him with Prescott. Froude, he says, remembers that there are some golden threads in the black robe of the Dominican. Motley "finds it black and thrusts it farther into ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... She wore a hideous red-flannel wrapper, and in deference to Harmony a thimble. Her flat breast was stuck with pins, and pinkish threads revealed the fact that the bathrobe was still ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... said. "Let me unfasten it for you." And taking the threads of the hammock in one of her little hands and the button in the other, she quickly separated them. "I should think buttons would be very inconvenient things—at least, in hammocks," she said smiling. "You see, girls don't ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... clear waters of the Meuse flow freely between banks covered with rows of poplar trees and low bushes of alder and willow. Now they wind in sudden bends, now in gradual curves, for ever breaking up into narrow streams, and then the threads of greenish waters gather together again, or here and there are suddenly lost to sight underground. In the summer the river is a lazy stream, barely bending in its course the reeds which grow upon its shallow bed; and from the bank one may watch its lapping waters kept ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... part, which leaves the flax entire. If it be designed for fishing-lines, or other coarse work, nothing more is done to it; but if intended for cloth, it is twisted and beaten for a considerable time in a clear stream of water; and when dried, twisted into such threads as the work requires. It has been before observed, that the New Zealand instructors were not very conversant in the mode of preparing the flax; but on what was learnt from them it was our business to improve. Instead of working it as soon as gathered, our ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... however, before the palace in the mountains — where John Sterling and his wife, Felix and Ottilie, have spent the intervening time — is set fire to by Gorm Smallin. The story is scarcely significant enough to follow all the threads. ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... to the east was flat, level land, which father called a plain. Scattered here and there were many farmhouses and quiet villages. Little bright, sparkling streams wound their way like silver threads through the green grass of the meadows. It was ...
— Home Geography For Primary Grades • C. C. Long
... Poetry I have tried, but could not approach it. It is too distant. Romance, which many found good, would never hold my attention. But I had Samuel Butler's Note Books with me for two years in France, and found that the right sort of thing. You may begin anywhere. There are no threads to look for. And you may stop for a time, while some strange notion of the author's is in contest for the command of the intelligence with your dark, resurgent thoughts; but Butler always won. His mental activity is too fibrous, masculine, and unexpected for any ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... of history is composed of many threads of divers colours, and the warp and the woof are often exchanged, yet so connected and knotted together that the continuity is never broken. On this web, Time has drawn the picture of the past—sometimes ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... The vagabond began trying it on directly. The touloup, which had already become somewhat too small for me, was really too tight for him. Still, with some trouble, he succeeded in getting it on, though he cracked all the seams. Saveliitch gave, as it were, a subdued howl when he heard the threads snapping. ...
— The Daughter of the Commandant • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... (about which we have lately had so much stir; and I have much concerned myself for our ropemaker, Mr. Hughes, who has represented it as bad), and we found it to be very bad, and broke sooner than, upon a fair triall, five threads of that against four of Riga yarn; and also that some of it had old stuff that had been tarred, covered over with new hemp, which is such a cheat as hath not been heard of. I was glad of this discovery, because I would not have the King's workmen discouraged (as ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... stratagem; a web of amplest size And subtlest woof beginning, thus she spake. Princes, my suitors! since the noble Chief Ulysses is no more, press not as yet My nuptials, wait till I shall finish, first, A fun'ral robe (lest all my threads decay) 130 Which for the antient Hero I prepare, Laertes, looking for the mournful hour When fate shall snatch him to eternal rest; Else I the censure dread of all my sex, Should he, so wealthy, want at last a shroud. So ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... kind heart to observe how the children fled from his approach, breaking up their merriest sports while his melancholy figure was yet afar off. Their instinctive dread caused him to feel more strongly than aught else that a preternatural horror was interwoven with the threads of the black crape. In truth, his own antipathy to the veil was known to be so great that he never willingly passed before a mirror nor stooped to drink at a still fountain lest in its peaceful bosom he should be affrighted by himself. This was what gave plausibility ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thought that we could glide so easily into so solemn a topic from looking at the quaint freaks of morning shadows? But the charm of the 'Task' is its sincerity; and in Cowper's mind the most trivial objects really are connected by subtle threads of association with the most solemn thoughts. He begins with mock heroics on the sofa, and ends with a glowing vision of the millennium. No dream of human perfectibility, but the expected advent of the true Ruler of the earth, is the relief to the palpable ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... had returned from the theatre; and Viola fatigued and exhausted, had thrown herself on a sofa, while Gionetta busied herself with the long tresses which, released from the fillet that bound them, half-concealed the form of the actress, like a veil of threads of gold. As she smoothed the luxuriant locks, the old nurse ran gossiping on about the little events of the night, the scandal and politics of the scenes and the tireroom. Gionetta was a worthy soul. ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... leaves from the season's shoots, sterile flowers from the lower axils, in heads suspended at the end of silky threads 1-2 inches long; calyx campanulate, pubescent, yellowish-green, mostly 6-lobed; petals none; stamens 6-16; anthers exserted; ovary wanting or abortive: fertile flowers from the upper axils, usually single or in pairs, at the end of a short peduncle; involucre ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... 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. By way of experiment, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... watching with deep interest the ceremonial form of the straddha. He saw the women place balls of rice, milk, and leaves of the tulsi plant in earthenware platters, then sprinkle over this flowers and kusa-grass; they added threads, plucked from their garments, to typify the presenting of the white death-sheet to the dead one; a priest all the time mumbling a prayer, at the end of the simple ceremony receiving a fee ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... seemed confused, as if scarcely knowing how to take up the threads of her own history. Afterwards she tried to speak more slowly, her voice sounding as if she were worn out both from her recent suffering and from the effort to recount her own and ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... indeed, in them statecraft may be said to have had its dawn; yet Henry VIII., by the sheer force of his tyranny and despotic will, baffled them both. While Cromwell, the greatest genius in Europe, thought he held all the threads of intrigue in his own hands, his royal master by the dogged pursuit of one end overthrew the minister's entire scheme. Saturated though he was with Machiavellian theories, a man of one book, and that book The Prince, Cromwell lost all by his inability to read the bent ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... sat down beside Glaucus. She drew from her girdle a ball of the many-colored threads, or rather slender ribands, used in the weaving of garlands, and which (for it was her professional occupation) she carried constantly with her, and began quickly and gracefully to commence her task. Upon her young cheeks the tears were already dried, a faint but happy smile played round her lips—childlike, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... barbarous, I shall not deny. War! Is it by cunning design—in order to hide from men thy true nature—that pomp and circumstance attend thy march; that poetry and music set in brightest colors, the rays of light struggling through thy heavy darkness, that history weaves into threads of richest glory the woes and virtues of thy victims? Stripped of thy show and tinsel, what art thou but the slaying of men?—the slaying of men by the thousands, aye, often by the tens, ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... Frapp was a baker in a back street—a slum rather—just off that miserable narrow mean high road that threads those exquisite beads, Rochester and Chatham. He was, I must admit, a shock to me, much dominated by a young, plump, prolific, malingering wife; a bent, slow-moving, unwilling dark man with flour in his hair and eyelashes, in the ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... felt sure of sympathy in all he might say on the subject. But that "first day school was opened!"—how Faith's thoughts sprang back there,—with what strange, mixed memories the vision of it came up before her! That day and time when so many new threads were introduced into her life, which were now shewing their colours and working out their various patterns. It was only a spring there and back again, however, that her thoughts took; or rather the vision was a sort of background to Reuben's delineations, and her eye was upon ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... saw the land of hope, outspread before them, a wide sweep of rolling country, covered with trees and canebrake, cut by streams of clear water, flowing here and there, and shining in the distance, amid the green, like threads of silver wire. All gazed, keen with interest and curiosity, because this unknown land was to be their home, but none was more eager than Henry Ware, a strong boy of fifteen who stood in front of the wagons ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... comfortably arranged like this, and command the light; to have at your orders an invisible army, always ready, always devoted, always submissive; to know the other side of everything; to be duped by no intrigue because you hold the threads of all within your fingers; to see through all partitions; to penetrate all secrets, search all hearts, all consciences,—these are the things you fear! And yet you were not afraid to go and wallow in a Thuillier bog; you, a thoroughbred, allowed yourself to be harnessed ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... flood of hard commonsense, as clear and crisp as the sunshine that filled his room. Slowly as he woke he gathered together the broken threads of the memories of the evening which had ended, so he told himself, in a trick of common hypnotism. That accounted for it all; the whole strange talk he had had was under a spell of suggestion from the extraordinary vivid boy who had once ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... of its cooling waters keeping time to the song of mocking birds in shrubs and trees. In the spacious grounds which swept to the water's edge more than a thousand magnificent trees spread their cooling shade. The white rays of the Southern sun shot through them like silver threads and glowed here and there in the changing, shimmering splotches on ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... loose threads of the daughter's hair through her slender fingers, but said little more, and presently fell into a deep slumber. Florida gently lifted her head away, and remained kneeling before the sofa, looking into the ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... smelling-organs, and these are much more numerous in the males than in the females. As the males, without any unusual development of their olfactory organs, would almost certainly be able sooner or later to find the females, the increased number of the smelling-threads has probably been acquired through sexual selection, by the better provided males having been the more successful in finding partners and in producing offspring. Fritz Muller has described a remarkable dimorphic species of Tanais, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... is sent by the hands of two men to the women, who may not approach the men's tent while the cooking is going on. The men who convey the flesh to the women pretend to be strangers bringing presents from a foreign land; the women keep up the pretence and promise to tie red threads round the legs of the strangers. The bear's flesh may not be passed in to the women through the door of their tent, but must be thrust in at a special opening made by lifting up the hem of the tent-cover. When ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... pointed out the composite nature of this pleasure, or named the ingredient in it which gives the chief charm to this getting back. It is pleasant to feel the pressure of friendly hands once more; it is pleasant to pick up the threads of occupation which you dropt abruptly, or perhaps neatly knotted together and carefully laid away, just before you stept on board the steamer; it is very pleasant, when the summer experience has been softened and sublimated by time, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... conveyed to her the fatal news. Little did she think how her companion had guarded and hated this souvenir. Cecil glanced sharply at the other's hair, harsher and more wiry now, and intersected with silvery threads, still it was like enough to satisfy her of the identity without the confirmatory cry of surprise with which the poor woman received it from her hands. Had she known this earlier, I think Cecil would ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... traditions of his race are very strong," remarked Chrysophrasia, languidly examining the embroidery, a magnificent piece of work, about a yard and a half square, wrought in gold and silver threads upon a dark-red velvet ground; evidently of considerable antiquity, but in excellent preservation. "Paul, dear," continued Miss Dabstreak, seeing Patoff enter with Hermione, "what would you give for this lovely thing? How hard it is to bargain! ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... 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, and his Hands ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... not follow with any interest the story of three young ladies in reduced circumstances who had started a dressmaking business and who were destined clearly to marry the men they loved and who loved them and who would continue to love them long after the silver threads had appeared among the gold. But now in the long lonely days spent with her baby in the lodging (Dick went away early in the morning and sometimes did not return till twelve o'clock at night), a story in a copy of The Family Herald lent to her by the landlady, on the ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... obtain strings of uniform thickness throughout, a requisite which can only be insured by careful gauging. In selecting the E string, choose those that are most transparent; the seconds and thirds, as they are made with several threads, are seldom very clear. The firsts never have more than a few threads in them, and hence, absence of transparency in their case denotes inferior material. Before putting on the first string, in particular, ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... glory; his ashes shall be worthy to mingle with those of his fathers! He will return to his deserted comrades, and she, the beloved, will follow him, for does not she, now clinging in holy trust to his arm, seem willing to give into his hands the whole web of her future destiny? Its threads shall be of gold, and the sun of love shall shine ever upon it. Weave the brilliant mist in glittering woof, O glowing imagination of youth I Beautiful cloud-dreams, which the setting sun of life paints and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... together over uneven ground she gave him her hand to hold, and there was very little to say and no need of saying it until they came to the hill overlooking the pasture, yellowing toward the end of summer, full of late bloom and misty colour passing insensibly into light. Threads of gossamer caught on the ends of the scrub or floated free, glinting as they turned and bellied in the windless air, to trick the imagination with the hint of robed, ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... repudiation of any other possible bride. "Where are you going, aunt Dora; back to the Blue Boar? or will you come with me?" he said, as they stood together at the door of St Roque's. Mr Wentworth felt as if he had caught the beginning threads of a good many different lines of thought, which he would be glad to be alone ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... supply of human machines always available. Their initial cost is nothing. So it pays to overwork them, scrap them promptly, and install fresh ones. Thus it comes that the costly spinning machines in the Southern mills are exquisitely cared for, while the cheap little boys and girls who tie the broken threads are made to last an average four or five years. In art it is different. The artist knows that he is, like Swinburne's Hertha, at once the machine and the machinist. It is dawning upon him that one chief reason why the old ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... was—that dress in Evelina's shop off Shaftesbury Avenue! It was four o'clock on a fine day early in April, and was Fanny the one to spend four o'clock on a fine day indoors? Other girls in that very street sat over ledgers, or drew long threads wearily between silk and gauze; or, festooned with ribbons in Swan and Edgars, rapidly added up pence and farthings on the back of the bill and twisted the yard and three-quarters in tissue paper and asked "Your pleasure?" of ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... an inferior rank in the creation. Some of the negroes actually seemed to envy the caparisons of their fellow-brutes, and eyed with jealousy their glittering harness. In imitation of this finery, they were fond of thrums of many-colored threads; and I saw one creature, who supported the squalid rag that wrapped his waist by a suspender of gaudy worsted, which he turned every moment to look at on his naked shoulder. The greater number, however, were as unconscious ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... backward, O Time, in your flight, Make me a child again, just for to-night! Mother, come back from the echoless shore, Take me again to your heart as of yore; Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care, Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair; Over my slumbers your loving watch keep;— Rock me to sleep, mother,—rock me ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... properly constructed. The hair was of brown yarn and hung down on her neck in several neat braids. Her eyes were two silver suspender-buttons cut from a pair of the Magician's old trousers, and they were sewed on with black threads, which formed the pupils of the eyes. Margolotte had puzzled over the ears for some time, for these were important if the servant was to hear distinctly, but finally she had made them out of thin plates of gold and attached them in place by means of ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... should be carefully darned at once when it begins to wear and become thin, and may thus be preserved for a long time. When new, it should be washed before being made up, and the threads raveled or drawn, so as to make the ends exactly straight. Napkins should be washed before being cut apart. When not required for regular use, the linen should be folded loosely, and laid away without ironing in some place where it will not be subjected to pressure. When needed, ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... to knit will be glad to know how to make this pretty scarf. It is knitted with two threads, one of white and the other of chinchilla zephyr worsted, and wooden needles, crosswise, in rounds going back and forth. Strands of worsted are knotted in the ends for fringe. Begin the scarf with a thread of white and a thread of chinchilla worsted, cast ...
— Harper's Young People, March 2, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... any pattern, and is generally striped or checked with coloured threads of silk mingled with the other ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... raised upon lions' claws. But, beautiful as those lamps are, the light which they gave must have been weak and unsteady, and little superior to that of common street-lamps, with which indeed they are identical in principle. The wick was merely a few twisted threads, drawn through a hole in the upper surface of the oil-vessel; and there was no glass to steady the light, and prevent its varying with every breeze ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... territory which should enable him to hold his own between the emperor and the French king. Tales of definite schemes of early ambition are often fabricated in the later life of a conqueror, but in this case they may be believed, as all threads of testimony lead ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam |
