"Treadmill" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... activity and no advance, that it is all moving round like the scenes in some circular panorama, that after it has gone the round back it comes again, that it is the same thing over and over again, that life is a treadmill, so to speak, with an immense deal of working of muscles; but it all comes to nothing over again. 'The rivers run into the sea and the sea is not full, and where the rivers come from they go back ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... finger to me, and then he was gone—gone, never to return. I do not know his history. 'Soup of a sausage-stick!' said the jailer, and I went to him; but I was wrong to trust in him. He took me up, indeed, in his hand; but he put me in a cage, a treadmill. That was hard work—jumping and jumping without getting on a bit, and ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... and walked thither. It had been made, said the hatter, for a young sporting party who attended to a gentleman's stables, and knew a thing or two. He had got into trouble, it was explained, and was "doing his time on the circular staircase," which I took to mean the treadmill. That was the reason the article had been thrown on the maker's hands. It seemed just the thing Tempest described. The top was as flat as the lid of a work-box; indeed, it was precisely like a somewhat broad-brimmed chimney-pot-hat cut down to ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... Shanghai River. These war-junks, though perfectly useless either for defence or attack, are gorgeous objects to the eye, with their carving, their scarlet lacquer and profuse gilding. A Chinese stern-wheeler is a quaint craft, for her wheel is nothing but a treadmill, manned by some thirty half-naked coolies, who go through a regular treadmill drill, urging the boat along at perhaps three miles an hour. In addition to their deck passengers, these boats have rows of little covered niches for superior personages, and in every niche sits a grave, ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... spring gushed forth and furnished water to the ships, Juan Fuller had his washhouse. Within a stone's throw was the grist mill of Daniel Sill where a mule turned, with the frequent interruptions of his balky temperament, a crude and ponderous treadmill. Grain laden ox-carts stood ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... that forbidden ground seemed to him miles long, and he felt that he was running as a man in a dream, and, at the highest pitch of agonized exertion, covering no space, but only working the air in one place, like a treadmill. All that was in his mind, heart, and soul was to reach Crailey. He had known by the revelation of Carewe's face in what case he would find his friend; but as he ran he put the knowledge from him with a great shudder, ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... Then I should want time, time, time. For it is a sad fact that sight-seeing as commonly done is one of the most wearying things in the world, and takes the life out of any but the sturdiest or the most elastic natures more efficiently than would a reasonable amount of daily exercise on a treadmill. In my younger days I used to find that a visit to the gallery of the Louvre was followed by more fatigue and exhaustion than the same amount of time spent in walking the wards of ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... State—a man without grace of manner or beauty—in their nomenclature, "a solemn prig," defied all ingenuity of explanation, was an increasing wonder outlasting the prescribed nine days. He rode with the ill assurance of one who, accustomed to the sawdust floor, treadmill round, and enclosing walls of a city riding-school, was bewildered by the unequal roads and free air of the breezy country. He talked learnedly of hunting, quoting written authorities upon this or that point, of whom the unenlightened Virginians had never heard, much less read; equipped ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... I saw him every morning, in the carpet slippers he wore in the house and the black clothes no tailor could make really fit his gaunt, bony frame, was a homely enough figure. The routine of his life was simple, too; it would have seemed a treadmill to most of us. He was an early riser, when I came on duty at eight in the morning, he was often already dressed and reading in the library. There was a big table near the centre of the room: there ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... world is full of people whose points of view are just exactly as right and wise and ideal as his own; and begins to feel with, and PULL WITH these other people, instead of against them; when he does this he will find himself out of the treadmill to stay. As he shows a disposition to consider other people's ideals and help others in the line they want to go, he will find the whole world eager to help him in the way he wants to go. The self-righteous ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... the urgent whinney which called one to the other and told of loneliness when separated is no longer heard. It is pathetic to think that these good creatures have been robbed of the one thing which gave color to their lives and lifted them above the dreary treadmill of duty for duty's sake. The kindly friendship of each for his yoke-fellow is not the old sympathetic companionship, which will come again only when the cooling breezes, running brooks, and knee-deep pastures of the ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... of every distasteful obligation, the ground on which all chosen pleasures were refused. It was ever "Kings can not do this," or "Kings must do that," and the "this" was always sweet, the "that" repellent; in Krak's hands monarchy became a cross between a treadmill and a strait-waistcoat. "What's the use of being a king?" I dared once ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... The treadmill continued until Arithelli would have welcomed an accident as a break in the grinding monotony. The exercise instead of making her hot, had made her shiver as if with great cold. She felt as if she had been practising for days instead of hours. It was of no use! She could not go on any ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... be rather a fatiguing journey, you know," says Captain Ringwood, confidentially, to Ethel Villiers. "It's an awful lot of stairs; I've been there, so I know all about it—it's worse than the treadmill." ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... instead of running three hundred nights, would be as little endured on the stage as 'Monsieur Thomas' would be; the heroes who aspire toward that ideal are now consigned by public opinion to Rhadamanthus and the treadmill; while if, like Monsieur Thomas, they knocked down their own father, they would, instead of winning a good wife, be 'cut' by braver and finer gentlemen than Monsieur Thomas himself: but what does this ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... not a chivalrous concession on the part of the men, but proceeded simply from the lack of occasion for the exercise of their selfish propensities. No one would be so foolish as to say that even the most savage Indian would put his squaw into the treadmill merely for the fun of seeing her toil. He makes a drudge of her in order to save himself the trouble of working. Now the Navajos were rich enough to employ slaves; their labor, says Major Backus, was ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the door for a ride in the park, and we went together. I had refused the park twice within an hour, and had told myself that nothing should induce me to follow that treadmill procession again, yet when he said, in his quiet way, "You had better take half an hour's ride, Jack," I felt ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... all his civic honours thick upon him, from the magisterial chair, and made hairdresser to the ladies of the harem—threatened with the bastinado for awkwardness in combing, as he now commits other unfortunate fellows to the treadmill for crimes scarcely more enormous? Paul de Kock derives none of his interest from odd juxtapositions. He knows nothing about caves and prisons and brigands—but he knows every corner of coffee-houses, and beer-shops, and ball-rooms. And these ball-rooms give him the command of another set of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... transferred from the earth to Mars, the new conditions of life could scarcely have been more different from the old than was life in Portman Square married to Nelson Smith, from the treadmill as Mrs. Ellsworth's slave-companion. What the Portman Square experiences of the bride would have been if Knight had allowed the Annesley-Setons to begin by ruling it would be dangerous to say. ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... lively and brave, did not in the least feel himself at home; he acted as if he were walking on peas, over a slippery floor. How long and wearisome the time appeared; it was like being in a treadmill. And then they went out for a walk, which was very slow and tedious. Two steps forward and one backwards had Rudy to take to keep pace with the others. They walked down to Chillon, and went over the old castle on the rocky island. They saw the implements of torture, the deadly ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... extended out over the horse. Farther up they observed a couple of coolies irrigating the land with a machine which had four paddles for moving the water, with four more each side of the stream, under a frame to which two men were holding on, and working treadmill fashion, with their feet on each of the four arms. They noticed mixed teams of horses and bullocks, such as one sees in Naples. The most curious was a mule-litter, which was simply a sedan between ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... the whir of many sewing-machines, worked by the sweater's slaves with weary feet and aching backs, drowned every feeble note of joy that struggled to make itself heard above the noise of the great treadmill. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... climbed a treadmill with more hopeless despair than Buel worked in his little room under the lofty roof. He knew no one; there were none to speak to him a cheering or comforting word; he was ignorant even of the names of the men who accepted the articles from his pen, which appeared unsigned in the daily papers ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... of the laws of human mature," said the Traveller; "and for the sake of GOD'S working world and its wholesomeness, both moral and physical, I would put the thing on the treadmill (if I had my way) wherever I found it; whether on a pillar, or in a hole; whether on Tom Tiddler's ground, or the Pope of Rome's ground, or a Hindoo fakeer's ground, ...
— Tom Tiddler's Ground • Charles Dickens
... agreed; "it's a regular treadmill when it has enslaved one, and keeps you going on and on without progressing a bit. The object of society is to tire you out and keep you from indulging in any ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... was no happier than the old. He was weary of vigils and fasts, weary of studies and penances, weary of prayers and sermons. He felt like a slave in a treadmill. He knew that he must go on. His honour, his conscience, his sense of duty, bound him. He could not go back to the old careless pagan life again; for something had happened within him which made a return impossible. ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... carried his own fuel, he made little noise, and he would not explode. His only failing was that he would leave the track; and to remedy this defect the early railroad builders hit upon a happy device. Sometimes they would fix a treadmill inside the car; two horses would patiently propel the caravan, the seats for passengers being arranged on either side. So unformed was the prevalent conception of the ultimate function of the railroad, and so pronounced was ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... action when, with lamplight gloating o'er the scene, I bask at leisure in my den, and read my fav'rite magazine. And so all day I stay at home attending to the treadmill grind; but when night comes afar I roam, and ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... or Donald M'Leod. Later Lamb sent Wilson, who seems to have asked for some verse about Defoe, the "Ode to the Treadmill," but Wilson did not ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... of river steamer which will amaze the American is an old stern-wheeler run by man power. It is provided with a treadmill just forward of the big stern wheel. Two or three tiers of naked, perspiring coolies are working this treadmill, all moving with the accuracy and precision of machinery. The irreverent foreigner calls these the "hotfoot" boats, and in the land where a coolie may be hired all ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... course, when she has the money to gratify her tastes. Jim—poor fellow, I shall be glad to see him take it easy, for once. He reminds me of the old horse I saw the other day running one of those infernal treadmill threshing machines—always going, but never getting there. He works, and works hard, and then he gets a job nights and works harder; but he never quite catches up with his bills, I fancy. What a world of solid comfort he'll take with that hundred thousand! I can hear ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... devised in the eighteenth century, but none was particularly successful. They were stationary, and it was necessary to bring the sheaves to them. The seventh patent issued by the United States, to Samuel Mulliken of Philadelphia, was for a threshing machine. The portable horse-power treadmill, invented in 1830 by Hiram A. and John A. Pitts of Winthrop, Maine, was presently coupled with a thresher, or "separator," and this outfit, with its men and horses, moving from farm to farm, soon became an autumn feature of every ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... professors and residents of Williamstown there is scarcely a tradition or trace of his presence. He did not fit into the treadmill of daily lessons and lectures. He was impatient of routine and discipline. There is a story extant, which is a self-evident fabrication, that President Mark Hopkins, meeting him on the street one day, asked him how he was getting along with his studies. Field ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... and learned to run the tractor, is breaking sod and summer-fallowing for me. For there is always another season to think of, and I don't want the tin-can of failure tied to my spirit's tail. As I say, the days slip by. Morning comes, fresh as a new-minted nickel, we mount the treadmill, and somebody rolls the big red ball off the table and it's night again. But open-air work leaves me healthy, my children grow a-pace, and I should be ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... madly from her sphere and sought to be Europe. She has already taught Europe many things in the sphere of Invention, and is destined to teach her many more; and the fact that her Carriages are condemned as too light and her Pianos as too heavy, her Reaping Machines as "a cross between a treadmill and a flying chariot," &c., &c., by critics very superficially acquainted with their uses, and who have barely glanced at them in passing, proves nothing but the rashness and hostility of their contemners. From such unworthy disparagement I appeal ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... good with regard to intellectual pleasures; the same law operates. We see men who are the flower of their age in intellect, who pass beyond their fellows and tower over them, entering at last upon a fatal treadmill of thought, where they yield to the innate indolence of the soul and begin to delude themselves by the solace of repetition. Then comes the barrenness and lack of vitality,—that unhappy and disappointing state into which ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... the principle already stated applies. The way to learn to write is by writing; not just by the dreary treadmill of practicing upon formal "compositions," but by having something to write that one cares to express. The written language lessons should, therefore, always grow out of the real interests and activities ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... violently. "I say, old chap, what would you have gained by overtaking the lady?" Cintras sniffed; Berkeley laughingly remarked that the staircase reminded him of the sort you see at a harvest with a horse on the treadmill. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... on his circle about the boy, and Dick turned slowly with him, always facing the eyes that faced him. He could dimly make out the shape of a rifle at the saddlebow, but the Sioux did not raise it, he merely rode on in that ceaseless treadmill tramp, and Dick wondered what he meant to do. Was he waiting for the others ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... for strange voyages even for a little while! I am tired of the road; and so are you, and small blame to you. Your fathers also tired of the treadmill, and mine of the conquering marches of the Republic. ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... quite an inventive person, had patented the treadmill mechanism to represent horse-racing on the stage, a device which was afterward used with such great effect in "Ben-Hur." He was so much impressed with it that he had a play written around it called ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... half-honest existence selling knicknacks, penniless students, inventors who while away the time they are dying of starvation telling all they meet of the riches they might have had; all who have failed on the daily treadmill of bread-making, or who have never had a chance even to enjoy the privilege of industrial slavery. Outside of Russia there has never been a novelist so taken up with all ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... that bribery had been committed, and was so confident that such a one as Mr. Browborough could have been returned to Parliament by none other than corrupt means! In his present mood he would have been almost glad to see Mr. Browborough at the treadmill, and would have thought six months' solitary confinement quite inadequate to the offence. "I never read anything in my life that disgusted me so much," he said to ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... blamed thing so as to get the same right wunst any way—is played wid the feet. You slide the sheet wid the holes punched into 'em into the wrack over the keeze and then wurrk the feet up and down like yer husband Tana used to do at home in the treadmill. ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... over my want of curiosity reminds me that on this very occasion Charles Greville offered to take me all over the Coldbath Fields Prison, and show me the delights of the treadmill, etc., and expressed great astonishment that I did not enthusiastically accept this opportunity of seeing such a cheerful spectacle, and still more amazement at my general want of enlightened curiosity, which he appeared to consider quite unworthy ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... grief. "What only don't they do with you, how don't they abuse you, until you grow accustomed to everything, just like blind horses on a treadmill!" In the station house he was received by the district inspector, Kerbesh. He had spent the night on duty, had not slept his fill, and was angry. His luxurious, fan-shaped red beard was crumpled. The right half of the ruddy face was still crimsonly glowing from lying long on the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... and seasons, however, as for example at all high feasts and festivals, Tu-Kila-Kila had respite for a while from this constant treadmill of mechanical divinity. Whenever the moon was at the half-quarter, or the planets were in lucky conjunctions, or a red glow lit up the sky by night, or the sacred sacrificial fires of human flesh were lighted, then Tu-Kila-Kila could lay aside his ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... believe, then, that in that yearning towards the miracle of a sun quenched in sea distance, felt and felt again in human hearts through countless generations, the westward stream of human activity on this planet had its rise? Is it unreasonable to picture, on an earth spinning eastward, a treadmill rush of feet to follow the sinking light? The history of man's life in this world does not, at any rate, contradict us. Wisdom, discovery, art, commerce, science, civilisation have all moved west across our world; have all in their cycles ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... reason enough—there have been lots of reasons since his great-grandfather's days. What the devil—why should they want a reason referring to yesterday precisely? Don't you realize that the worker, who has so long been working the treadmill in the belief that the movement was caused by somebody else, has suddenly discovered that it's he that keeps the whole thing in motion? For that's what is going on. The poor man is not merely a slave who treads ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... custom and usage, he was determined to make a new departure in the annals of modern sovereignty. Three years of continuous slavery on the treadmill of the Throne had been sufficient to make him thirst for freedom,—freedom of speech,—freedom of action. He had tacitly submitted to a certain ministry because he had been assured that the said ministry was ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... given to the comfort of these useful servants. Truly, there is great need for the refining, civilizing, and uplifting influence of the gospel here in the city where it had its earliest proclamation. I also visited two grist mills operated by horses on a treadmill, which was a large wooden wheel turned on its side, so the horses could stand on it. I was not pleased with the nearness of the manure in one of these mills to the material from which the "staff ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... strong muscles, his handsome, boyish face, with its cluster of chestnut hair and steady grey eyes. All that, he knew, wanted life, animation, movement. At twenty-three he was longing for something to take him out of the treadmill round in which he had been fixed for five years. He had no taste for handing out money in exchange for cheques, in posting up ledgers, in writing dull, formal letters. He would have been much happier ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... conveyed in the last sentence, "I do not care three straws—I know enough of the law to know that if she have rich friends in this town, and you have none, she will be protected and you will go to the treadmill." ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... invitation he followed the negro into what had been called the engine-room, though to Winn's eye it looked as little like an engine-room as any place he had ever known. At one side was a horse-power treadmill, such as he had often seen used for the sawing of wood. Half of it was sunk below the level of the deck, and covered with a removable floor. It was geared in the most direct and simple manner to a shaft ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... poet, was one of the earliest of Roman writers. Born at Sarsina in Umbria, of free parentage, he at first worked on the stage at Rome, but lost his savings in speculation. Then for some time he worked in a treadmill, but finally gained a living by translating Greek comedies into Latin. Twenty of his plays have come down to us. They are lively, graphic, and full of fun, depicting a mixture of ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... Odam restored me to my self-respect; for he stared at me till I went to bed; and he broke his hose with excitement. For being in the leg-line myself, I wanted to know what the muscles were of a man who turned a wheel all day. I had never seen a treadmill (though they have one now at Exeter), and it touched me much to learn whether it were good exercise. And herein, from what I saw of Odam, I incline to think that it does great harm; as moving the muscles too much in a line, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... that order the thing he did not desire, and for which he gave the order only because he thought it was expected of him, was being done. And he fell back into that artificial realm of imaginary greatness, and again—as a horse walking a treadmill thinks it is doing something for itself—he submissively fulfilled the cruel, sad, gloomy, and ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... several individuals at once and to have installed apparatus and working machinery requiring larger space than that furnished by any of the other calorimeters. Near the chair calorimeter a special calorimeter with treadmill is ...
— Respiration Calorimeters for Studying the Respiratory Exchange and Energy Transformations of Man • Francis Gano Benedict
... medium, chance insisted on enlarging Henry Adams's education by tossing a trio of Virginians as little fitted for it as Sioux Indians to a treadmill. By some further affinity, these three outsiders fell into relation with the Bostonians among whom Adams as a schoolboy belonged, and in the end with Adams himself, although they and he knew well how thin an edge ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... that had greeted her eye since she had left old Maggie and her weakling calf. I could feel how all those details sank into her soul, for I had not forgotten how they had sunk into mine when I came fresh from ploughing forever and forever between green aisles of corn, where, as in a treadmill, one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving a shadow of change. The clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of their linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of the instruments, ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... no wish of that sort," she replied, hastily; "I could not quite bring myself to play with children in the nursery." I suppose mother had told her about the dolls. "Well, we both start on our separate treadmill on ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... was uproarious, her knowing patricians Made "Bread and the Circus" a cure for each row; But not so the plan of our noble physicians, "No Bread and the Treadmill,"'s the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... be members of a society better than ours, whilst the "right to work" only means the right to be always a wage-slave, a drudge, ruled over and exploited by the middle class of the future. The right to well-being is the Social Revolution, the right to work means nothing but the Treadmill of Commercialism. It is high time for the worker to assert his right to the common inheritance, and to ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... a treadmill? Think not of the grind, But think of the grist, what is done and to do, The world growing better, more like to God's mind, By long, faithful labor ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... were poled or tracked through the broken water, towed by the men, from such foothold as the rocky banks afforded, by means of a long lariat tied to the boat's bow, with loops over each trackman's shoulder, one man steering with a long sweep. When this treadmill work was impossible, owing to too steep banks, and where no batteau locks existed, the crew hauled the boats across the portage on a skidway of small rolling logs, and, so journeying, Prescott was reached. ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... became immediately successful, not so much for adaptability to the treadmill of that calling as for the brightness and distinctive character of his writing. He easily established a reputation as a humorist, and while he fairly deserved the title he often regretted that he could not entirely shake it off. His powers of perception were phenomenally keen, and ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... morning I took the children and went to Luther's. We went to the barn to find him, and there he was, grinding oats. The children were much grieved and very indignant because the horse was in a treadmill, and could not stop if ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... the universe does not stand for success unless there is set over against it the wealth of soul which Marcus Aurelius, that great apostle of plain living and high thinking, ever set forth as an antidote to the treadmill grind of commercial life. Shakespeare struck the keynote of this lofty conception of life, and pronounced a never-dying eulogy upon the supreme dignity of character ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... better qualified for the treadmill, had so steered his waggon that the hub of its off fore wheel had met the gatepost. This he had not observed, but, a firm believer in the omnipotency of the lash, had determined to reduce the check, whatever might be its cause, by methods of blood and iron. Either because he was the most convenient ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... love would be, when it should come, free of its tasks and obligations; no longer in the treadmill making her world go round, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... thing that was so vile? In order that she might do so, he would persist in finding out what had been the circumstances of this young man's life. If, as he believed, the things which George Hotspur had done were such as in another rank of life would send the perpetrator to the treadmill, surely then she would not cling to her lover. It would not be in her nature to prefer that which was foul and abominable and despised of all men. It was after this, when he had seen Mr. Boltby, that the idea occurred to him of buying up Cousin ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... a typewriter, checking up a ledger, feeding the swift machinery, endless stitching, gripping a locomotive lever, pushing the plow, tending the stock, doing the chores, tiresome examination papers; and all the rest of the endless, endless, doing, day by day, of the commonplace treadmill things, that must be done, that fill out the day of the great majority of human lives. This one whom we are following unseen is doing quietly, cheerily his daily round, with a bit of sunshine in his face, ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... dressed in green and yellow. If she had said, "Pretty Annie," there would have been some sense in it. See that gray squirrel at the door of the fruit-shop, whirling round and round so merrily within his wire wheel! Being condemned to the treadmill, he makes it an amusement. ...
— Little Annie's Ramble (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of the vast army of women wage workers look upon work as a permanent issue, in the same light as does man. No matter how decrepit the latter, he has been taught to be independent, self-supporting. Oh, I know that no one is really independent in our economic treadmill; still, the poorest specimen of a man hates to be a parasite; to be known ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... likelihood of a persecution for perjury, a two-faced Testament-kisser will be on his guard, and be very careful to tell only such lies as cannot be clearly proved against him. He dreads the prospect of daily exercise on the treadmill, he loathes the idea of picking oakum, and his gorge rises at the thought of brown bread and skilly. But so long as that danger is avoided, there are hosts of witnesses, most of them very good Christians, who have been suckled on the Gospel in Sunday Schools, and fed afterwards ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... aged; but we went on from circuit to circuit with no other change except that when we saved enough money William bought a new horse. It is a terrible treadmill, and we could expect no reward or change in this world, no promotion, no ease of mind except the ease of prayers, which I never enjoyed as much as William did. I had feelings that prayers did not put down the desires that they did not ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... The treadmill round of duties that Makes any life inane and flat, Without diversion sandwiched in, The drudgery, the overplus Of toil and trouble arduous, Were ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... was over, and it was late in the evening, when she sat down, tired and faint, with a great bundle of girls' themes or compositions to read over before she could rest her weary head on the pillow of her narrow trundle-bed, and forget for a while the treadmill stair of labor she was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... simultaneously discover them to be intolerable, is nothing strange. It is all very well to lie in gaol, from which there seems no chance of escape. Treadmill, oakum, skilly, and the rest—one may as well go through with them quietly, for fear of something worse. But if word goes round that one or two prisoners have crept out of gaol, who would not burn to follow? Would not grievances ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... was hurting her, but his insurgent youth demanded its right of speech after long repression. "I'm a man," he cried, "and I want to do a man's work in the world and take a man's place. Just because my ancestors chose to slave in a treadmill, I don't have to stay in it, do I? You have no right to ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... and eight miles a day, and doing extra work before and after school hours, and my health began to fail. Those were years I do not like to look back upon—years in which life had degenerated into a treadmill whose monotony was broken only by the grim messages from the front. My sister Mary married and went to Big Rapids to live. I had no time to dream my dream, but the star of my one purpose still glowed in my dark horizon. It seemed that nothing short of ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... reading through these volumes, all other labour, the labour of thieves on the treadmill, of children in factories, of negroes in sugar plantations, is an agreeable recreation. There was, it is said, a criminal in Italy, who was suffered to make his choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. He chose the history. But the war of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... has pounced on me has neither taste nor feeling; the sight of fetters still gives him a start; crack a whip in his neighbourhood, and his ears tingle; the treadmill is an abode of awe to him. He is now insufferable—insults his new equals, and whips his old fellows to see what that side of the transaction feels like. He ends by finding a mistress, or taking to the turf, or being cajoled by parasites; ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... time that summer was spent in improving forty acres of his farm, on which he raised some sod corn and vegetables, Our corn for bread was ground in Mr. Wigglesworth's treadmill, turned by-oxen. We had no fruit for many years, but a few wild sorts, and the vegetables were a welcome variation in our diet of meat ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... ladder labored Stevens, but, though he climbed manfully, he remained less than a foot above the floor. The ladder went down like a treadmill, as Stevens climbed—it was an endless ladder rolled down on Stevens' side and up on the other. The Deacon Militant, from his perch on the chair, encouraged Stevens to climb faster so as not to be out-stripped. With labored breath and ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... treadmill here. Perhaps by the time you come on in December I will be able to report something accomplished. But oh! the misery of dealing with people who are eternally suspicious and have ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... when it bears out its full meaning, thought Lieutenant Bleibtreu. But what was it here? What had he found the practical construction of the term? To follow, day by day, step by step, in the same treadmill of dull routine, only relieved by occasional but all too brief glimpses of the freedom that lay beyond "the service"—that was the meaning of comradeship. There was none of that unselfish intimacy, that ready sympathy and help between the members of the caste ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... to the men, "catch that long villain with the dwarf telescope and take him into the house; if I don't get him six weeks of the treadmill my name is not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... others, whose wickedness has been a part of this story, was not so pleasant. The two gamblers who tempted the old man to steal Mrs. Jarley's strong box were detected in another crime and sent to jail. Brass became a convict, condemned to walk on a treadmill, chained to a long line of other evil men, and dragging wherever he went a heavy iron ball. After he was released he joined his wicked sister, Sally, and the two sank lower and lower till they might even be seen on dark nights on narrow London streets searching in refuse boxes for bits of ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... came like the "devil-horse" that the Mexican called him, with his ears flattened and his mouth gaping; he came with such velocity that Cordova, running as only consummate terror can make a man run, seemed to be racing on a treadmill—literally standing still. ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... silence, while Ser Perth let Dave consider it. But it was too much to accept at once, and Dave's mind was a treadmill. He'd agreed to admit anything, but some of this was such complete nonsense that his mind rejected it automatically. Yet he was sure Ser Perth was serious; there was no humor on the face of the prissy thin-mustached ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... humdrum, treadmill life, and believe I'm destined to better things. If I could only get a good position in the army or navy, the world would hear from me. They say money opens every door, and mother must open some good ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... easy and very natural to turn from this ruffian, shocked by the hardened retort; but answer his question, why should it? Should he be frightened by the sight of a dead man? We are born to die, he says, with a careless triumph. We are not born to the treadmill, or to servitude and slavery, or to banishment; but the executioner has done no more for that criminal than nature may do tomorrow for the judge, and will certainly do, in her own good time, for judge and jury, counsel and witnesses, ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... whispered words of tenderness, brought tears to the eyes of those who listened. Again he lived through that terrible dawn when first he had read her letter of farewell. Each word was bitten with acid into his mind. Again and again he repeated the phrases, now dully, as a wearied beast goes round a treadmill, now with weeping, and in convulsions of a grief so fierce that the merciful ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... tree was a deep hole where flotsam leaves and twigs performed an endless treadmill dance in the ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... life, or endeavoured to express its pleasure and satisfaction by walking round and rubbing itself against a person, raising and putting down its fore-feet alternately, with the toes extended, as if practising the goose step or working on some feline treadmill, why that cat did then. The poor animal could not speak, of course, but it really seemed to utter some inarticulate sounds that must have been in cat language a paean of joy and praise and thanks at its deliverance; and, finally, in a paroxysm of affection and endearment, it turned ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... that two-thirds of the reforms for which men labour would not be needed if the artificialities of society were abandoned. He is, of course, unpractical and self-centred. Listen to Thoreau, the arch-enemy of the social treadmill, and to ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby |
