"Fife" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... back the second line was only well on its way, which meant that only about half the army had passed in review. We could see from fifteen to twenty thousand men in column—that is to say, about one army corps—at a time. The quick, vigorous step, in rhythmical cadence to the music, the fife and drum, the massive swing, as though every man was actually a part of every other man; the glistening of bayonets like a long ribbon of polished steel, interspersed with the stirring effects of those historic flags, in countless numbers, made a picture impressive beyond the power of description. ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... the seat of learning, assured us, in a recent interview, that the military propensities of Muggs were developed at an early age. She observed that it was impossible to fix his attention on the classic page of Noah Webster when the Bluetown Fusileers were passing the school house with drum and fife, and that the motive of his first experiment at "hooking jack" was a desire to attend a country muster in the neighboring town. She added, that she distinctly remembered having confiscated a box of tin soldiers with which he was amusing himself, and that he threatened to "punch her eye" if she ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... this, and think the music has finally ceased, so sultry still lies the air around us, or only disturbed by the fife and drum of talent, calling to the parade-ground of social life. The ear ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Mission Ship by several special trips. Daily and nightly I addressed meetings, and God's people were moved greatly in the cause. After meeting ail expenses while in port, there remained a sum of L634: 9: 2 for the up-keep of the vessel. The Honorable George Fife Angus gave me L241—a dear friend belonging to the Baptist Church. But there was still a deficit of L400 before the Dayspring could sail free of debt, and my heart was sore as I cried for ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... he never heerd in his life That th' Apostles rigged out in their swaller tail coats, An' marched round in front of a drum an' a fife, To get some on 'em office, an' some on 'em votes; But John P. Robinson, he Says they didn't know everything ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... the war-meeting, still burned in the village below. The hum of supplementary speeches to the excited crowds that still lingered about came to their ears, mingled with cheers from throat rapidly growing hoarse, and the throb and wail of fife and drum. Then, uplifted on the voices of hundreds who sang it as only men, and men swayed by powerful emotions can, rose the ever-glorious "Star-Spangled Banner," loftiest and most inspiring of national hymns. Through its long, forceful ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... excited troops could scarcely be kept in their places as, with the stirring strains of lively fife and rattling drum, they went rushing and pouring along on their way ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... exempt from vulgar throng, May sing through Roman towns the Ascraean song, Or court in Learning's elmy bowers relief From individual shame or general grief: Silence is music to a soul outworn With the wild clangor of the warlike horn, The paltry fife, the brain-benumbing drum. When, white Astraea! will thy kingdom come,— The chaster period that our boyhood saw,— Arts above arms, and without conquest, Law,— Rights well maintained without the strength of steel ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... mystery immediately!" shrieked the people. And above all the voices, that of Johannes de Molendino was audible, piercing the uproar like the fife's derisive serenade: "Commence ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... fine a specimen of rugged manhood as all the border could produce, being over six feet in height, of commanding figure and boundless energy and courage. He was Daniel Morgan and, laughing as he spoke, he said: "I've heard of hunting Indians with fife and drum, but charmin' 'em with song is something new, ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... Dinmont, who has succeeded to the keeping of our royal flocks within the forest of Jedwood, where, thanks to our royal care in the administration of justice, they feed as safe as if they were within the bounds of Fife? Where be our heralds, our pursuivants, our Lyon, our Marchmount, our Carrick, and our Snowdown? Let the strangers be placed at our board, and regaled as beseemeth their quality and this our high holiday; to-morrow we will ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... present. She saw two hundred men distributed about the vessel, some at the capstan, some on the forecastle, some in the tops, and others in the waist, and she heard the order to "heave round." Then the shrill fife commenced the lively air of "the girl I left behind me," rather more from a habit in the fifer, than from any great regrets for the girls left at the Dry Tortugas, as was betrayed to Mulford by the smiles of the officers, and the glances they cast ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... every house of the neighbourhood, sounded the fife and lute, while the inmates indulged in music and singing. Above head, the orb of the radiant moon shone with an all-pervading splendour, and with a steady lustrous light, while the two friends, as their exuberance ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... treated us like tirt. "Do what we tell you," said they. I haf peen captain of the furnace-men twenty years, and I say to the Union—[excitedly]—"Can you tell me then, as well as I can tell you, what iss the right wages for the work that these men do?" For fife and twenty years I haf paid my moneys to the Union and—[with great excitement]—for nothings! What iss that but roguery, for all that this ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Kirkcaldy, in the county of Fife, Scotland, on the 5th of June 1723. He was the son of Adam Smith, Writer to the Signet, Judge Advocate for Scotland and Comptroller of the Customs in the Kirkcaldy district, by Margaret, daughter of John Douglas ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... Bothwell, rose, they said, to avenge the death of the king, and to draw the son from hands which had killed the father and which were keeping the mother captive. As to Murray, he had kept completely in the background during all the last events; he was in the county of Fife when the king was assassinated, and three days before the trial of Bothwell he had asked and obtained from his sister permission to take a journey on ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... one. There are other battles and armies besides those where thousands of disciplined men move over the ground to the sounds of the drum and fife. Life itself is a battle, and no grander army has ever been set in motion since the world began than that which for more than two centuries and a half has been moving across our continent from the Atlantic to ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... cause on earth To many a battle growing, Of music God has thought them worth, A gift of His bestowing. It came through Jubal into life; For Lamech's son inventing The double sounds of drum and fife, They both became consenting. For music good Wakes manly mood, Intrepid goes Against our foes. Calls stoutly, "On! Fall on! fall on! Clear field and street Of hostile feet, Shoot, thrust them through, and cleave, Not one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... come, with fife and drum, And gleaming pikes and glancing banners: Though the eyes flash, the lips are dumb; To talk in rank would not be manners. Onward they stride, as Britons can; The ladies following in ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... Weirie comes home, and has the "fause nourrice" burnt at the stake. From the circumstance that the name of the husband of the murdered lady was Weirie, it is conjectured that this tragedy took place at Balwearie Castle, in Fife, and the old people about there constantly affirm that it really occurred. I am not aware that there exists any connection between the hero of this story and the nursery rhyme; for, as I before stated, I think Lonkin ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... when, with clarion, fife, and drum, He claims and wins his own; When o'er the deluge drifts his ark, To rest upon ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... part 2, fol. 28. 2. Hector Boetius, l. 14, &c. 3. St. Felan flourished in the county of Fife, and probably in the monastery of Pettinuime, where his memory was famous, as is testified by the author of MS. memoirs on the Scottish saints, preserved in the college of the Scots at Paris, who declares himself to have been a missionary priest in Scotland to ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... boats that have gone on their last fishing. Since Sir Patrick sailed from Aberdour, what a multitude have gone down in the North Sea! Yonder is Auldhame, where the London smack went ashore and wreckers cut the rings from ladies' fingers; and a few miles round Fife Ness is the fatal Inchcape, now a star of guidance; and the lee shore to the east of the Inchcape is that Forfarshire coast where Mucklebackit ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... above a black alpaca apron, her dried-apple face surmounted by a dingy lace cap topped with a soiled red ribbon, eyed him cautiously, and remarked, after loosening out the mantilla: "Dem teater gurls only vant such tings, and dey can pay nuddin'. No, I vouldn't even gif fife tollars. Petter dake it ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... future voters and fighters, demanded an active share in the proceedings, and were organized by Squire Bean into a fife and drum corps, so that by day and night martial but most inharmonious music woke the echoes, and deafened mothers felt their patriotism oozing out at ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... this little voyage on the schooner, which was managed by the French traders who had threatened my life two days before. The wind was light, and the sailors amused themselves with music—one of them playing on a fife. He was attempting to play a tune which he had not properly learned. I was walking the deck, and told him to give me the fife, when I played the tune. The Frenchmen gathered around my feet, and looked with astonishment and delight. From that hour they were my warm ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... old neighbors and friends. Whether he stood in Washington, the unchallenged prince and chief in the Senate, or in foreign lands, the kingliest man of his time in the presence of kings, his heart was in New England. When the spring came, he heard far off the fife bird and the bobolink calling him to his New Hampshire mountains, or of the waves on the shore at Marshfield alluring him with a sweeter than siren's voice to his home by ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... among them, fast fading was his life, A lancer from the border, from the good old county Fife; Already was death's icy grasp upon his honest brow, When through the ward was passed the word, "The Queen ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... wielders of British authority avoid the extremity by concession? Boston, indeed America, had seen no hour of intenser interest, of deeper solemnity, of more instant peril, or of truer moral sublimity; and as this assembly deliberated with the sounds of the fife and drum in their ears, and with the soldiery in their sight, questions like these must have been on every lip,—and they are of the civil-war questions that cause an involuntary shudder in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... Boy Scouts, sturdy with an enormous sense of uniform and valor, marched through the asphalt alleys of the park with trained, small-footed, regimental precision—small boys with clean, lifted faces. A fife and drum ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... the soldiers until the last of them had passed the window, and then he listened to the music, the sound of drum and fife, until it died away, and they heard only the usual murmur of the city. Then the homesickness, the longing for the great free country to the north grew upon him and became ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... heard, like the note of a whistle, fife, or flute. This is due to a dry constriction of the bronchial tubes and it is heard in chronic bronchitis ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... occasions a laughable incident occurred, as scores of these bluejackets and marines passed up Esquimalt Road. A squad or more might have been seen walking along, headed by a bluejacket playing a lively tune on a fife or tin whistle. One or two were dancing to the tune, when all at once the music stopped, as a halt was made, the command being "'Alt all 'ands!" They had come opposite a wayside house and the sign over the porch—saloon—had ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... winters ago we had a storm-stead show on a small scale; but nowadays the farmers are less willing to give these wanderers a camping-place, and the people are less easily drawn to the entertainments provided, by fife and drum. The colony hung together until it was starved out, when it trailed itself elsewhere. I have often seen it forming. The first arrival would be what was popularly known as "Sam'l Mann's Tumbling-Booth," with its tumblers, ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... I grew sick of my sanctified sot, The regiment at large for a husband I got; From the gilded spontoon to the fife I was ready, I asked no more but a sodger laddie. Sing, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... a rope around you and yonder cask of Jamaica, and leave you to read your stolen book in peace until Saunderson (that's the overseer, and he's none so bad if he was born in Fife) shall come. You can have it out with him; or maybe he'll hale you before the man that owns the store. I hear they expect ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... exclusively of women, who seem to do penance for both sexes in Cuba. The military band, which leads the column of infantry, marches, playing an operatic air, while turning one side for the soldiery to pass on towards the altar. The time-keeping steps of the men upon the marble floor mingle with drum, fife, and organ. Over all, one catches now and then the subdued voice of the priest, reciting his prescribed part at the altar, where he kneels and reads alternately. The boys in white gowns busily swing incense vessels; the tall, flaring ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... quiet seaport town with little or no commerce, situated on the coast of Fife, immediately opposite to Edinburgh. It is sheltered at some distance on the north by a high and steep hill called the Bin. The harbour lies on the west, and the town ended on the east in a plain of short grass called the Links, on which the townspeople had the right of pasturing their cows ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... to the captain, and presently the steward came and beckoned me to follow him down to his cabin, remarking that nobody would see me. I saw the captain, and told him what I knew of the matter. The robbery continued to be the sole topic of talk the rest of the journey. Clearing the coast of Fife, we soon came in sight of Edinburgh, and, sailing up the Forth, we finally landed at Leith. It was Sunday afternoon, and there were large numbers of people about to watch us land. The majority of the people ran for the first pier, but the captain ordered the vessel to land at the second pier, which ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... was celebrated in military fashion; the train-band marched to the music of drum and fife accompanied by a procession of urchins. The crowning exercise was the firing of a salute by the whole company. It made every boy wish to be a soldier as soon as possible. Then the muskets were stacked under a great elm tree from a limb ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... Maloney who bled at the nose Afther blowin' the fife; and mayhap ye'd suppose 'Twas no matther at all; but the books all agrade Twas a serious visceral throuble indade; Wid the blood swimmin' roond in a circle elliptic, The Schneidarian membrane was ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... enfants de la patrie— Electric... piercing... shrill as a fife the voice of a little Russian breaks out of the shivered circle. Another voice rises... another and another leaps like flame to flame. And life—surging, clamorous, swarming like a rabble crazily ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... plan to have our revenge, should it be repeated. Two or three days later we had the same tune, at another village, and I caught up a couple of large stones, ran ahead, and dashed them through both ends of the drum, before the boy, who was beating it, knew what I was about. Jack snatched the fife out of the other boy's hand, and it was passed from one to another among us, until it reached one who threw it over the railing of a bridge. After this, we had no more music, good or bad. Not a word was said to any of us ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... of Fife, withouten strife, He bound him over Solway; The great would ever together ride That race ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... is murky!—Fie, my lord! a soldier, and afear'd? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?—Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?—The Thane of Fife had a wife; Where is she now?—What, will these hands ne'er be clean?—No more o' that, my lord, no more o' that; you mar all with this starting.—Here's the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh! oh! oh!—Wash ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... Hindu, followed by a boy bearing an earthen pot, who had noiselessly reconnoitered the vicinity of the great tree. The boy most keenly watched all the movements of his white-robed master, who, drawing a little fife from his red cummerbund sash, began to play a shrill, weird tune. A frightened household coterie watched from a safe distance the thirty-foot circle of herbage around the shade of the giant tree trunk. A shudder crept over the watchers as a huge brown head, with two white circles on the back ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... all the songs of the galleys and prisons, a diabolical and enigmatical gayety. We hear this strident and lilting refrain which we should say had been lighted up by a phosphorescent gleam, and which seems to have been flung into the forest by a will-o'-the-wisp playing the fife:— ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... enjoined the purchase, not the use, of the Prayer-Book, and its use was at once discontinued. The angry orders which came from England for its restoration were met by a shower of protests from every part of Scotland. The ministers of Fife pleaded boldly the want of any confirmation of the book by a General Assembly. "This Church," they exclaimed, "is a free and independent Church, just as this kingdom is a free and independent kingdom." The Duke of Lennox alone took ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... must have been twenty of them, both brass and fife, and they all played the Washington Post, but no two had the luck to fall on the same bar at the same moment. It was a medley of all the tunes in music, an absolute kaleidoscope of sounds, and meantime there was the clash of bells from the neighbouring belfries in honour of ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... they met a party of boys playing at soldiers. They had their drum, and fife, colors, and wooden guns, and tin swords, and flourished away in all the "pride, pomp, and ...
— Frank and Fanny • Mrs. Clara Moreton
... the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was called "The Bean," assumed the name of Beauelerc, and paid his addresses to a protegee of lord Fife. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... to the view of the world, the greatest man of this age, will be compelled, in order to give a faithful delineation, to take for his model the portrait which I, better than any one else, have been able to draw from fife. I think that no one has done this as yet; certainly not so ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... river she could see what looked like an approaching mob, but behind them could be distinguished horsemen. As she stood, the rabble ran, or pattered, or, keeping step to the music, marched by, followed by a drum-and-fife corps. After them came the horsemen, and the girl's tired eyes suddenly sparkled and her pale face glowed, as she recognised, pre-eminent among them, the tall, soldierly figure of Washington, sitting Blueskin with such ease, grace, and dignity. He was talking to an odd, foreign-looking officer ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... Richard would not enter the port with only joyous demonstrations, on account of the death of his late commander, but mingled signs of grief with them. At one moment bugles rang out cheerily, at the next they were answered by melancholy trumpet notes, and the wailing fife was heard at intervals between the lively rattle of the drum and the clash of arms. From one mast-head hung a Turkish banner reversed, and from another a long black streamer, the ends of which dipped in the water. In this manner he entered the river of London in his ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... good-will of another chemist's business. But before settling down in their new home, the Howitts undertook a long pedestrian tour through Scotland and the north of England, in the course of which they explored the Rob Roy country, rambled through Fife, made acquaintance with the beauties of Edinburgh, looked in upon Robert Owen's model factories at New Lanark, got a glimpse of Walter Scott at Melrose, were mistaken for a runaway couple at Gretna Green, gazed reverently ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... cities were the strange and wonderful things whereof Lorenzo Surprenant had told, with others that she pictured to herself confusedly: wide streets suffused with light, gorgeous shops, an easy fife of little toil with a round of small pleasures and distractions. Perhaps, though, one would come to tire of this restlessness, and, yearning some evening only for repose and quiet, where would one discover the ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... had some claim to be their suzerain, a claim which the Scots were slow to acknowledge. The old line of Scottish princes of the Celtic race died out. Alexander III. fell with his horse over a cliff on the coast of Fife. Two competitors for the throne arose, both of them of Norman descent,—John Baliol and Robert Bruce. The Scots made Edward an umpire, to decide which of them should reign. He decided for Baliol (1292), stipulating that ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... 1839 married Margaret Christie, and he went far afield for a wife, namely from Newbiggin in Forfar, where for fourteen years he had his one and only charge, to Strathmiglo in Fife. The marriage was fruitful and a happy one, although there is a hint in the record of some religious difference upon which one would like to dwell if the subject were not too esoteric for this generation. The minister showed a certain indulgence, and so long as his wife ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... the laboratory in which the mind of Orange Ulster is prepared to face the tasks of the twentieth century. Barbaric music, the ordinary allowance of drum to fife being three to one, ritual dances, King William on his white horse, the Scarlet Woman on her seven hills, a grand parade of dead ideas and irrelevant ghosts called up in wild speeches by clergymen and politicians—such is Orangeism in its full heat of action. ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... And squadrons of the Prince, trampling the flowers With clamour: for among them rose a cry As if to greet the king; they made a halt; The horses yelled; they clashed their arms; the drum Beat; merrily-blowing shrilled the martial fife; And in the blast and bray of the long horn And serpent-throated bugle, undulated The banner: anon to meet us lightly pranced Three captains out; nor ever had I seen Such thews of men: the midmost and the highest Was Arac: all about his motion clung ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... the fife, War's rattling throng, And a wandering life The world along! Swift steed—and a hand To curb and command— With a blade by the side, We're off far and wide. As jolly and free, As the finch in its ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... electricity were inferior to those grown under its influence. Hubeck came to the conclusion that seeds germinated more rapidly and buckwheat gave larger returns; in all other cases the electric current produced no result. Professor Fife in England and Otto von Ende in Germany carried on experiments at the same time, but with negative results, and these scientists advised the complete abandonment of applying electricity to agriculture. After some years had elapsed Fichtner began a series ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... professional studies were finished, and I had occasion to visit a Fife laird near the East Neuk. The gentleman was notable for his taste in kitchen-gardening; and having a particularly fine bed of Jerusalem artichokes which I must see, he conducted me to the scene of his triumphs, when, hard at work with the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... beginning; literally no chance to obtain new music, or instruments; and that the better class of men—who usually make the best musicians—always preferred the musket to the bugle. Nor was there either incentive to good music, or appreciation for it, among the masses of the fighters. The drum and fife were the best they had known "at musters;" and they were good enough still, to fight by. So, recalling the prowess achieved constantly, in following them, it may be wondered what possible results might ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... along the table, then Foster said: "That was a great voice of Weatherbee's. I've seen it hearten a whole crowd on a mean trail, like the bugle and fife of ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... this squeak of the fife, and this batter of drum Lo! the Swiss of the Church from Perugia come; The militant angels, whose sabres drive home To the hearts of the malcontents, cursed and abhorred, The good Father's missives, and "Thus saith the Lord!" ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... slipped away. One morning Theodore was on his way from one office to another when he heard the sound of drum and fife and saw a body of the strikers marching up Washington street. Every boy within sight or hearing at once turned in after the procession, and ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... travellers of gentle condition commonly put up their horses. There he thought it was likely Sir David Hamilton had stabled his steed, and he divined that, by going thither, he would learn whether that knight had set forward to Fife, or when he was expected so to do; the which movement, he always said, was nothing short of an instinct from Heaven; for just on entering the stabler's yard, a groom came shouting to the hostler to get Sir David Hamilton's horses saddled outright, ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... drum is resounding, And shrill the fife plays; My love, for the battle, His brave troop arrays; He lifts his lance high, And the people he sways. My blood it is boiling! My heart throbs pit-pat! Oh, had I a jacket, With hose and with hat! How boldly I'd follow, And march through the ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... grove and entered the village with fife and drum, attracting auditors, and held a torchlight meeting in the market-place. There was preaching, and the chanting, in rhythm but not rhyme, of a versified story of the life of Christ. The missionaries make much ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... surveying the havoc of the field, was instantly aware of the enemy's manoeuvre. His people were employed rifling the pockets of the National Guard, and had made a tolerable booty, when the great Duke, taking a bell out of his pocket, (it was used for signals in his battalion in place of fife or bugle,) speedily called his scattered warriors together. "Take the muskets of the Nationals," said he. They did so. "Form in square, and prepare to receive cavalry!" By the time Concombre's regiment arrived, he found a square of bristling ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Mountain, Of Corinth and Donelson, Of Kenesaw and Atlanta, And tell how the day was won! Hush! bow the head for a moment - There are those who cannot come. No bugle-call can arouse them - No sound of fife or drum. ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... seems peculiarly necessary and proper, however, in this work, to give a very curious unpublished record respecting the miserable fate of the Spanish armada, as written by a contemporary, the Reverend James Melville, minister of Anstruther, a sea-port town on the Fife, or northern, shore of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... loud notes of the drum And fife tones shrilling on the ear, The music of our nation's hymns Rose 'neath the elm trees loud and clear; When on the Common's grassy plain The city poured her countless throng, And blessings fell like April rain On each one as ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... minute," begged Nat, and, while he assumed an attitude as though he was trying to solve a problem in geometry, Fred drew out a little tin fife and played such a doleful ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young
... fight for their own enslavement. To get to the breastworks was but to get a chance to run to the Yankees; and thousands of those whose elastic step kept time with the martial strains of the drum and fife, as they marched on through city and town, enroute to the front, were not elated with the hope of Southern success, but were buoyant with the prospects of reaching the North. The confederates found it no easy ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... instance of evolution, though it has meant much to our race. We wish, however, following Professor Buller's Essays on Wheat (1919), to explain the method by which this good seed was discovered. From one we may learn all. The parent of Marquis Wheat on the male side was the mid-Europe Red Fife—a first-class cereal. The parent on the female side was less promising, a rather nondescript, not pure-bred wheat, called Red Calcutta, which was imported from India into Canada about thirty years ago. The father was part ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... imposing sight. General Kelly sat a magnificent black charger, and with waving banners, to the martial music of fife and drum corps, company by company, in two divisions, his two thousand stiffs countermarched before him and hit the wagon-road to the little burg of Weston, seven miles away. Being the latest recruit, I was in the last company, of the last regiment, of ...
— The Road • Jack London
... practising in an old barn on the wayside, and presently, in honor of visitors—who were myself and another—the pipers were sent for. They were five tall lads, who came striding down the street of Flemish cottages, with the windbags under their arms, and then, with the fife men sitting on the straw around them and the drummers standing with their sticks ready, they took their breath for "the good old Irish tune" ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... Angus, Argyll and Bute, Clackmannanshire, Dumfries and Galloway, Dundee City, East Ayrshire, East Dunbartonshire, East Lothian, East Renfrewshire, City of Edinburgh, Eilean Siar (Western Isles), Falkirk, Fife, Glasgow City, Highland, Inverclyde, Midlothian, Moray, North Ayrshire, North Lanarkshire, Orkney Islands, Perth and Kinross, Renfrewshire, Shetland Islands, South Ayrshire, South Lanarkshire, Stirling, The Scottish Borders, West Dunbartonshire, West Lothian Wales: ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... the first Central American republic to follow. During the War President Cabrera "would allow nothing to interfere with the advancement of free and compulsory education in the State." (See Domville- Fife, C. W., Guatemala and the States ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... deepened lines, Fresh from his own loved mountain bore The murmur of their pines; And the glad sound of waters, The blue rejoicing streams, Whose sweet familiar tones were blent With the music of his dreams: They brought no sound of battle's din, Shrill fife or clarion, But only tenderest memories Of his own fair Arlington. While thus the chieftain slumbered, Forgetful of his care, The hollow tramp of thousands Came sounding through the air. With ringing spur and sabre, And trampling feet they come, Gay plume and rustling banner, And fife, and ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... was one procession of men in blue and the air was full of martial music. The fife and drum could be heard almost all the time, so you may imagine what emotions a colored person of my age would experience, especially as father's church was a center for congregating the Negroes and advising them. That was a difficult ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... go find my Hollis," said she turning another corner, and running the wrong way with all her might. Past candy-stalls, past toy-shops, past orange-wagons. Hark, music again! Not the soft strains of a harp, but the stirring notes of bugle, fife, and drum. Fly kept ...
— Little Folks Astray • Sophia May (Rebecca Sophia Clarke)
... foughten for life, With ancyent and standard, with drum and with fife, With brave clanging trumpetts, that sounded so free; Was not this a ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... in the great wars of Marlborough. Mr. Webb met us at our uncle's, accosting us very politely, and giving us an invitation to visit him at his regiment. Let my poor brother go and listen to his darling music of fife and drum! He bade me tell the ladies that they should hear from him. I kiss their hands, and go to dress for dinner, at the Star and Garter, in Pall Mall. We are to have Mr. Soame Jenyns, Mr. Cambridge, Mr. Walpole, possibly, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... F. Ferdinand Fife Was a student of life: He was coarse, and excessively fat, With a beard like a goat's, But he held all the notes Of ruined John Jeremy Platt! With an adamant smile That was brimming with guile, He said: "I am took with the face Of your beautiful ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... not, reader, for it was a fashion of those musical as well as valiant days) up rose that noble old favorite of good Queen Bess, from cornet and sackbut, fife and drum; while Parson Jack, who had taken his stand with the musicians on the poop, worked away ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... and fife in summer evening's calm, And odorous with incense all the year, With nard and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... of marching riflemen. In front of one of these, the fife and drum corps playing behind him, was a young Tory, who had insulted the company, and was, therefore, made to carry a gray goose in his arms with this maxim of Poor Richard on his back: 'Not every ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... remain in many cases under-size and produce fewer and smaller heads. In the Fife and Bluestem varieties the infected heads previous to maturity exhibit a darker green color, and remain green longer than the normal heads. In some varieties the infected heads stand erect, when normal ones begin to droop as ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... 'Leave my post?' I say. 'Yais,' said he, 'I know your army has not moche provision lately, and maybe you are ongrie?' 'Ma foi, yais,' said I; 'I aff naut slips to my eyes, nor meat to my stomach, for more dan fife days.' 'Veil, bon enfant,' he say, 'come vis me, and I vill gif you good supper, goot vine, and goot velcome.' 'Coot I leave my post?' I say. He say, 'Bah! Caporal take care till you come back.' By gar, I coot naut resist—he vos so vairy moche ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... musical tailor, who had bestowed some cost upon his education, hoping to see him one day arrive at the dignity of an exciseman, or at least of a parish clerk. The lad grew up, however, as idle and musical as his father; and, being captivated by the drum and fife of a recruiting party, he followed them off to the army. He returned not long since, out of money, and out at elbows, the prodigal son of the village. He remained for some time lounging about the place in half-tattered soldier's dress, ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... saw an Elephant, That practised on a fife: He looked again, and found it was A letter from his wife. 'At length I realise,' he said, ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... a guest, is so written that we do not feel horror so much as an unbearable pity for Macbeth's mind. The horror is felt later, when it is made plain that the treachery does not end with that old man on the bed, but proceeds in a spreading growth of murder till the man who fought so knightly at Fife is the haunted awful figure who goes ghastly, killing men, women and little children, till Scotland is like a grave. At the end, the "worthy gentleman," "noble Macbeth," having fallen from depth to depth of degradation, is old, hag-haunted, sick at heart, ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... are the three "Banquets" respectively of Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch. Plutarch's has the least claim to historical accuracy; but the meeting of the Seven Wise Masters is a charming portraiture of ancient manners and discourse, and is as dear as the voice of a fife, and entertaining as a French novel. Xenophon's delineation of Athenian manners is an accessory to Plato, and supplies traits of Socrates; whilst Plato's has merits of every kind,—being a repertory of the wisdom of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... nation was concentrating its power. Behind him that nation was patching up its one great quarrel, and now a gray phantom stalked out of the past to the music of drum and fife, and Crittenden turned sharply to see a little body of men, in queer uniforms, marching through a camp of regulars toward him. They were old boys, and they went rather slowly, but they stepped jauntily and, in their natty old-fashioned caps and ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... who never felt a wound." So runs his word! Yet on the verge of strife, They jest not who have never known the knife; They tremble who in the waiting ranks are found, While those scarred deep on many a battle-ground Sing to the throbbing of the drum and fife. They laugh who know the open, fearless breast, The thrust, the steel-point, and the spreading stain; Whose flesh is hardened to the searing test, Whose souls are tempered to a high disdain. Theirs is the lifted brow, the gallant jest, The long last breath, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... stand around the room in a circle. The leader assigns to each some imaginary musical instrument—horn, fife, drum, trombone, violin, harp, flute, banjo, etc. Some well known, but lively air is given out and the band begins to play, each player imitating as nearly as possible the instrument he has been assigned. All goes well until the leader suddenly drops his instrument and begins playing ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... would like my darter to know as much as those that's likely to come arter. But if the world keeps on its progress so bewild'rin' and they put some more 'ologies into the schools together with cabinet organs and fife and drum, I'm afraid it will cost my darter more than it did ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... traversed the environs of the bay. He met only a few natives, with whom he had little intercourse. But one family becoming somewhat familiarized, established itself a hundred yards from the landing-place. Cook gave a concert for them, in which the fife and cornet were lavished on them in vain, the New Zealanders awarded the palm to ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... boatswain, as he wrung his son's hand, and stepped down the side of the fine frigate to which Pearce through the interest of his late captain had been appointed. The crew went tramping round the capstan to the sound of the merry fife, the anchor was away, and under a wide spread of snowy canvas the dashing "Blanche" of thirty-two guns, commanded by the gallant Captain Faulkner, stood through the Needle passage between the Isle of Wight and the main, on her way down channel, bound out to the ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... to love the wide scenes of sea and land spread out around that hill—a love he never lost, at home or far away. And long years after, with beautiful Sicilian hills before him and a lovely sea, he writes words of fond recollection of the bleak Fife hills, and the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the lances he had procured. On trial these were found excellent, and we were immediately exercised in their use. A muster was now made of our force, which amounted to two hundred and six men, including fife and drum, with five mounted cavalry, two artillery-men, few cross-bows, and fewer musketeers. This being the force, and such the weapons, with which we marched against and defeated the vastly ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... the drums are beating; the fife is calling shrill; Ten thousand starry banners flame on town, and bay, and hill; The thunders of the rising wave drown Labor's peaceful hum; Thank God that we have lived to see the saffron morning come! The morning of the battle-call, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... of the Pennsylvania line, stationed at Lancaster, marched in a body to Philadelphia, where they were joined by about two hundred from the barracks in that city. The whole body then proceeded, with drum and fife, and fixed bayonets, to the statehouse, where the Pennsylvania legislature and the continental Congress were in session, with the avowed purpose of demanding a redress of specified grievances from the state authorities. They placed a guard at every door, and sent a message in to the ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... to puy all Grass River claims. Dey don't sell none. I say, 'Champers, let 'em starf.' Den Champers, he let 'em. When supplies for crasshopper sufferers cooms from East we lock 'em oop in der office, tight. An' ve sell 'em. Huh! Cooms Yon Yacob an' he loan claim-holters money—fife per cent, huh! Puy 'em, hide an' hoof, an' horn, an' tail! Dey all swear py Yon Yacob. He rop me. I fix him yet ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... at ten pounds per annum. To some of the large towns, which hitherto had elected only in conjunction with others, as Glasgow and Aberdeen, separate or new members were to be conferred; while the Fife district of burghs was annihilated and thrown into the county; and some counties were conjoined. In the whole, Scotland was to have fifty members instead of forty-five. In Ireland the principal alterations were to be the introduction of the ten pounds' qualification; and that in towns ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the only one of the crew remaining on board, hastily belayed the clewline at the fife-rail, hauling it just taut enough to hold Bitts, without choking him to death. As the ruffian leaped into the boat, to which he had been assigned, Perth gave the order to shove off, and the runaways pulled with all their might ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... horse again with the retinue riding to the right and left and fared forward till they came to the river banks; when the troops alighted and pitched their tents and pavilions and standards to the blare of trump and the piping of fife and the dub-a-dub of drum and tom-tom. Moreover the King bade the tent pitchers set up a pavilion of red silk for the Princess Shamsah, who put off her scanty raiment of feathers for fine robes and, entering the pavilion, there took seat. And as she sat in her beauty, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... beats of the big drum, a crash from the brass instruments, which came echoing strangely back from the barrack walls, and away they went toward the gates, where half the boys and idlers of the neighbourhood were waiting, ready to give a cheer as the drum-and-fife band passed out first in solemn silence, followed by little Wilkins, looking very important at the head of the brass instruments, but in dangerous proximity to the trombone-players, cutting and slashing with their ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... was glad to pause, however, on the edge of this larger adventure; there was such a thrill even in the preliminary hovering. It affected her moreover as a peaceful interlude, as a hush of the drum and fife in a career which she had little warrant as yet for regarding as agitated, but which nevertheless she was constantly picturing to herself by the light of her hopes, her fears, her fancies, her ambitions, her predilections, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... prisoners. The escape was thus effected:—On a dark, rainy night, late in October, 1838, an iron bar having been previously cut through with a file given them from without, the sawing having been effected during performances on the shrill fife of one of the fifers of the garrison, which a prisoner had borrowed for the purpose of passing away the time and keeping up the spirits of his companions in misfortune, some of whom were despondent, Theller's conversation seduced a sentry into conversation, next to smoke a pipe, then to drink a ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... is made memorable by a consequence it had long after. There was a warship at this time stationed in the Firth, the Seahorse, Captain Palliser. It chanced she was cruising in the month of September, plying between Fife and Lothian, and sounding for sunk dangers. Early one fine morning she was seen about two miles to east of us, where she lowered a boat, and seemed to examine the Wildfire Rocks and Satan's Bush, famous ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thus takes off some of that solemn formality which belongs to such meetings, and, by his easy, and graceful familiarity, imparts to them somewhat of the pleasing character of a private entertainment. Near Sir W. Scott sat the Earl of Fife, Lord Meadowbank, Sir John Hope of Pinkie, Bart., Admiral Adam, Baron Clerk Rattray, Gilbert Innes, Esq., James Walker, Esq., Robert Dundas, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... NAME.—All congratulations to the Duke and Duchess of Fife. Great alterations and improvements are, it is said, being made at Mar Lodge. The name also is to be altered, and henceforth it is to be known as "Mar and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... Milan. Cardan in his narrative speaks of Edinburgh as the place where he met his patient, and does not mention any other place of sojourn, but the record just quoted goes on to say that he abode with the Primate for eleven weeks at his country residence at Monimail, near Cupar, Fife, where there is a well called to ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... bestowed the unremitted attention of his closing years,—the palaeontological history of the glacial beds,—that strange and as yet almost unknown period that ushered in the existing creation. He studied it minutely along the shores of the Moray Firth, on the east coast of Scotland, along the shores of Fife and the Lothians, and on the coast of Ayrshire and the Firth of Clyde. This last summer he made a tour through the centre of the island, and obtained boreal shells at Buchlyvie in Stirlingshire,—the omphalos of Scotland. The importance of this discovery, in connection with those ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... Segismund his Son. Astolfo his Nephew. Estrella his Niece. Clotaldo a General in Basilio's Service. Rosaura a Muscovite Lady. Fife ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... 3d of March, 1770. The sunset music of the British regiments was heard as usual throughout the town. The shrill fife and rattling drum awoke the echoes in King Street while the last ray of sunshine was lingering on the cupola of the Town-house. And now all the sentinels were posted. One of them marched up and down before the custom-house, treading ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... in 1839 his papers passed into the hands of Lady Maitland, who liferented his property of Lindores in Fife until her death in 1865. They then passed with the property to Sir Frederick's nephew, Captain James Maitland, R.N., and on his death to his brother, Rear-Admiral Lewis Maitland, my father, from whom they came ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... Bagnet, turning about from her saucepans (for she is cooking dinner) with a bright flush on her face. "Would you believe it? Got an engagement at the theayter, with his father, to play the fife in ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... supposed merits are open secrets, the jockeys are personal friends, the weather is bright and warm, the ladies wear their smartest dresses, the course is kept and order maintained with the aid of bluejackets from the gun-boat in port, while her drum and fife band or nigger troupe renders selections of varied merits. A race over, the successful owner and jockey are seized and carried shoulder high to the bar behind the grand-stand, where winners and losers alike have preceded them to secure a glass of champagne at the owner's expense, ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... substitutes of modern wisdom, let us use that which they cannot take from us, our books of "auld lear," and refresh ourselves with a peep at Leslie, in the Hogmanay of 16—. Who has not heard of "Christ's Kirk" in the kingdom of Fife, that place so celebrated by King James, in his incomparable "Christ's Kirk on the Green," for the frolics of wooers and "kittys washen clean," and "damsels bright," and "maidens mild?" That celebrated town was no other than our modern Leslie; and, though we cannot say ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... superb! O Manhattan, my own, my peerless! O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! O truer than steel! How you sprang! how you threw off the costumes of peace with indifferent hand; How your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and fife were heard in their stead; How you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude, songs of ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... Wilbur sez he never heerd in his life Thet th' Apostles rigged out in their swaller-tail coats, An' marched round in front of a drum an' a fife, To git some on 'em office, an' some on 'em votes; But John P. Robinson he Sez they didn't know everythin' down ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... nursing of soldiers was the old nun's specialty; she had been in the Crimea, in Italy, in Austria; and as she told the story of her campaigns she revealed herself as one of those holy sisters of the fife and drum who seem designed by nature to follow camps, to snatch the wounded from amid the strife of battle, and to quell with a word, more effectually than any general, the rough and insubordinate troopers—a masterful woman, her seamed and pitted ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the springtime of 1790, 'from Brittany to Burgundy, on most plains of France, under most city walls, there march and constitutionally wheel to the Ca-iraing mood of fife and drum—our clear glancing phalanxes;—the song of the two hundred and fifty thousand, virgin led, is in the long light of July.' Nevertheless, another song is yet needed, for phalanx, and for maid. For, two springs and summers having gone—amphisbaenic,—on ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... lead him to expend all the money in tin flutes. In one case the group he so incongruously headed would be for that one day a gang of make-believe banditti; in another, they would constitute themselves a fife-and-drum corps—with barreltops for the drums—and would march through the streets, where scandalised adults stood in their tracks to watch them go by, they all the while making weird sounds, which with them ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... voss all ashleep, 'Pap-a, Mr. Richlun sayss you shouldt come into teh offuss.' I kumpt in. Mr. Richlun voss tare, shtayndting yoost so—yoost so—py teh shtofe; undt, Toctor Tseweer, I yoost tell you te ectsectly troot, he toaldt in fife minudts—six minudts—seven minudts, udt may pe—undt shoadt me how effrapotty, high undt low, little undt pick, Tom, Tick, undt Harra, pin ropping me sindts more ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... of the winter wren's melody is its marked rhythm and accent, which give it a martial, fife-like character. Note tumbles over note in the true wren manner, and the strain comes to an end so suddenly that for the first few times you are likely to think that the bird has been interrupted. In the middle is a long in-drawn note, much like one ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... you will come over here on Sunday morning, bringing no brass band, fife or drums, I will tell ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... companion set out in a postchaise, journeying by Linlithgow and Falkirk to Stirling. They visited 'a dirty, ugly place called Borrowstounness,' where he turned from the town to look across the Forth to Dunfermline and the fertile coast of Fife; Carron Iron Works, and the field of Bannockburn. They were shown the hole where Bruce set his standard, and the sight fired the patriotic ardour of the poet till he saw in imagination the two armies again in the thick of battle. After visiting the ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... sound of fife and drum smote upon his ear, coming from somewhere up the street. He huddled down in a corner and began to moan. He knew the meaning of that signal-call. They were organizing for a rush upon the jail,—an irresistible, overwhelming charge that would sweep all opposition before ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... Lieutenant-Colonel Stirling and met, whilst going round their line, Major Morrison Bell and Captain Oppenheim. They seemed in very good fettle, and it would have been hard to find a finer lot of men. Taking leave of the 2nd Lovat Scouts, we worked along the trenches of the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry, under Colonel Mitchell, until we came to the 1st Lovat Scouts under Colonel Bailey. Lovat himself was sick, but Peyton commanding the 2nd Mounted Division turned up just when the inspection was at an end. He had got lost in ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... ye lee, ye ill womyn, Sae loud I hear ye lee; The ill-faured'st wife i' the kingdom of Fife Is ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... afire with patriotism. Sumter had fallen; Lincoln had issued his first call. The sound of the fife and drum rang in the streets. Men gave up work to talk and listen or go into the sterner business of war. Then one night in April, a regiment came out of New England, on its way to the front. It lodged at the Astor House to leave at nine in the morning. ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... danced. The handle of the fan consisted of the leg and foot of a turkey, while the body was composed of the brilliant and beautifully spotted feathers of the ocellated turkey, a bird peculiar to Yucatan and the adjacent country. There were two musicians, one with a long pito, or fife, and the other with a huehuetl or drum, which he struck with his hand. Hanging to the side of the drum near the top was a turtle-shell, upon which the drummer beat, from time to time, with a deer's horn. A standard was carried by the company, which bore a representation of the ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... Billet was writ hum by a Yung feller of our town that wuz cussed fool enuff to goe a-trottin inter Miss Chiff arter a Drum and fife. It ain't Nater for a feller to let on that he's sick o' any bizness that he went intu off his own free will and a Cord, but I rather cal'late he's middlin tired o' voluntearin By this time. I bleeve yu may put dependunts on his ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... and piercing fife, Woke Echo from her bed! The solemn woods with sounds were rife As on ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... crowd. Boys from High school are perched on the lampposts, telegraph poles, windowsills, cornices, gutters, chimneypots, railings, rainspouts, whistling and cheering the pillar of the cloud appears. A fife and drum band is heard in the distance playing the Kol Nidre. The beaters approach with imperial eagles hoisted, trailing banners and waving oriental palms. The chryselephantine papal standard rises high, surrounded ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... clarion, fill the fife! To all the sensual world proclaim, One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... with many-colored flowers. Nell was particularly charmed by the sight of paradisaical fly-catchers and rather large, black birds, with a crimson lining to the wings, which emitted sounds like a pastoral fife. Charming woodpeckers, rosy on top and bright blue beneath, sped in the sun's luster, catching in their flight bees and grasshoppers. On the treetops resounded the screams of the green parrot, and at times there reached them sounds as though of silvery bells, with which the small green-gray birds ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Particularly in the turbulent Borderland, a rude spirit of chivalry and a passion for wild adventure lingered among the Eliots, Armstrongs, Kerrs, Rutherfords, Homes, Johnstons, and other marauding clans, who acknowledged no law but march law, and held slack allegiance to "the King of Lothian and Fife." Every owner of a half-ruinous "peel" or border keep had a band of retainers within call, like the nine-and-twenty knights of fame who hung their shields in Branksome Hall; and he could summon them ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... dulcimer, hurdy-gurdy, vielle^, pianino^, Eolian harp. [Wind instruments]; organ, harmonium, harmoniphon^; American organ^, barrel organ, hand organ; accordion, seraphina^, concertina; humming top. flute, fife, piccolo, flageolet; clarinet, claronet^; basset horn, corno di bassetto [It], oboe, hautboy, cor Anglais [Fr.], corno Inglese^, bassoon, double bassoon, contrafagotto^, serpent, bass clarinet; bagpipes, union pipes; musette, ocarina, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and saw white flags fluttering before a drum and fife band and a knot of youths in sweaters gathered round the dummy breech of a four-inch gun which they ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... of his Sovereign, the Chevalier James Stuart, son of James the Second, or Seventh. He was defeated at the battle of Sheriff-Muir, his title being forfeited, and his lands of Mar confiscated and sold by the Government to the Earl of Fife. His grandson and representative, John Francis, lived at Alloa Tower (which had been for some time the abode of James VI. as an infant) where, a fire breaking out in one of the rooms, Mrs. Erskine was burnt, and died, leaving, ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... But yet Ile bury thee: Thou't go (strong Theefe) When Gowty keepers of thee cannot stand: Nay stay thou out for earnest. Enter Alcibiades with Drumme and Fife in warlike manner, and Phrynia ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... married sister (with a share in the brewing business), the husband and two children of the married sister, a parrot, a drum (performed on by the little boy of the married sister), two billeted soldiers, a quantity of pigeons, a fife (played by the nephew in a ravishing manner), several domestics and supernumeraries, a perpetual flavour of coffee and soup, a terrific range of artificial rocks and wooden precipices at least four feet high, a small fountain, and ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... you go out to the field, Oriole and Blackbird and Bobolink will fly after you and make the day more delightful to you; and when you go home tired at sundown, Vesper Sparrow will tell you how grateful we are. When you sit on your porch after dark, Fife Bird and Hermit Thrush and Wood Thrush will sing to you; and even Whip-poor-will will cheer up a little. We know where we are safe. In a little while all the birds will come to live in Massachusetts again, ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... through the Castle which stood near by. We entered the Castle through the great door-way and were soon treading the walls that had once sustained the cannon and the sentinel, but were now covered with weeds and wild flowers. The drum and fife had once been heard within these walls—the only music now is the cawing of the rook and daw. We paid a hasty visit to the various apartments, remaining longest in those of most interest. The room in which Martin the Regicide was imprisoned nearly twenty ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... engineer, and he might have succeeded in a masterly way in these sublime arts had he not early in life acquired the habit of the flute. He played the flute all day long, and often played the flute in the morning and the fife at night. As it was the flute that had won him his gracious wife, he thanked God for the gift and continued to play as long as he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... studious of appearances, that having despatched his labours, while others were yet in bed, he might have been found, at the usual hours of study, loitering on the banks of his beloved Cherwell, or in the streets, following the drum and fife, a sound which was known to have irresistible attraction for his ears,—a spectator at a military parade, or even one amongst a crowd at a public execution. He retained to old age the amiable simplicity and unsuspecting frankness of boyhood: his affection for his brother, to ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... morning glowing, What on the hill-top shines in flowing? "See you the Foeman's banners waving?" "We see the Foeman's banners waving!" Now, God be with you, woman and child, Lustily hark to the music wild— The mighty trump and the mellow fife, Nerving the limbs to a stouter life; Thrilling they sound with their glorious tone, Thrilling they go, through the marrow and bone. Brothers, God grant when this life is o'er, In the life to come that we meet once more! See the smoke how the lightning ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... The readers of Robinson Crusoe were in much the same position. Defoe was not only a true artist, but a man of noble, patient character, and his romance proved a healing medicine to many sick minds, pointing the way back to Nature and a natural fife, and creating a longing for the lost innocence ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... to the music, and for this reason Sir Arthur Sullivan has replaced it in the score of "Ivanhoe" by a high G flute. The piccolo is exactly an octave higher than the flute, excepting the two lowest notes of which it is deficient. The old cylindrical ear-piercing fife is an obsolete instrument, being superseded by a small army flute, still, however, called a fife, used with the side drum in the ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... the impressiveness of the long line as it slowly filed down the broad street under the graceful arches of the tall old elms, in the cold light of the cloudy afternoon. First came the drum corps, with wailing fife and muffled drum; next appeared the gray uniforms of the company who marched two by two, with bowed heads and reversed arms, to escort the hearse in their midst. Directly behind the hearse trotted a small, yellow figure, at sight of whom Alan stealthily ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... The daughter, at the breaking out of the war, was pursuing her studies at Washington College, in Iowa, an institution open to both sexes, and under the patronage of the United Presbyterian Church. But the sound of fife and drum, the organization of regiments composed of her friends and neighbors, and the enlistment of her brothers in the grand army of the Union fired her ardent soul with patriotism, and an intense desire to help on the cause in which the soldiers ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... Fife and Drums, as before } Drum Major } Who, on arrival in the Eight Trumpets } Hall, immediately went Kettle Drums } into the Gallery over the Eight Trumpets } Triumphal ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... Appleman and his more business-like wife getting somewhat more vigorous and emitting more domestic sparks, until there came a change to every one. The farmer, who had read of martial music, heard with his own ears the roll of the drum and the shrieking, encouraging call of the fife. War was on, and good men abandoned homes and families and surroundings because of what we call patriotism and principle. As for John Appleman, he was among the very first to enlist. He went into the army blithely. It is to be feared ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... heavy, pointed beak, his high cockade, the black stripe down his face, the expression of weight and massiveness about his head and neck, and his erect attitude, give him a decided soldier-like appearance; and there is something of the tone of the fife in his song or whistle, while his ordinary note, when disturbed, is like the clink of a sabre. Yesterday, as I sat indolently swinging in the loop of a grapevine, beneath a thick canopy of green branches, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... so touched by his evident affliction, and especially by the little story of the cat that his father took him a trip round the coast of Fife in The Pharos and he thus made an early and delightful acquaintance with some of the lights and harbours which his father had ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... orators. He followed my advice, and now feels the good effects of it. His defence of M. de Portes is worthy of Demosthenes. He came every year within a quarter of a league of the Hermitage to pass the vacation at St. Brice, in the fife of Mauleon, belonging to his mother, and where the great Bossuet had formerly lodged. This is a fief, of which a like succession of proprietors would render nobility ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... over difficulties in the pursuit of musical science. He was the son of a miller at Masham, a little town situated in the valley of the Yore, in the north-west corner of Yorkshire. Musical taste seems to have been hereditary in the family, for his father played the fife in the band of the Masham Volunteers, and was a singer in the parish choir. His grandfather also was leading singer and ringer at Masham Church; and one of the boy's earliest musical treats was to be present at the bell pealing on Sunday mornings. During the service, his wonder was still ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... you loquacious-delineate, mit der visible golt destitute-by tam! he schall mine eyes from der skleep fly-away mit der enchantment-glitter! Ach Gott! Nefer py vhite man vitness, you schall say, pefore fife unt seex yare pass-gone, unt by pushmen diminutive nomber unt platty few altogedder. Bot der localisation-topography unt der route you schall py der map mit you gross magnanimity indicate, unt Gott pless! ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... masters, the spirits. He, nothing daunted by the dreadful ceremonies which he saw, boldly answered, "Where are they? let me see them." And they called the spirits, which were three. And the first arose in the likeness of an armed head, and he called Macbeth by name, and bid him beware of the thane of Fife; for which caution Macbeth thanked him; for Macbeth had entertained a jealousy of ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... were to dine, and the duchess showed Sancho's letter to the duke, who was highly delighted with it. They dined, and after the cloth had been removed and they had amused themselves for a while with Sancho's rich conversation, the melancholy sound of a fife and harsh discordant drum made itself heard. All seemed somewhat put out by this dull, confused, martial harmony, especially Don Quixote, who could not keep his seat from pure disquietude; as to Sancho, it is needless to say that fear drove him to his usual refuge, the side or ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra |
