"Skein" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eggs and the great dishes of meat. Sis is delighted, and we are both in excellent spirits. She has coughed hardly any, and had no night-sweat. She is now busy mending my pants, which I tore against a nail. I went out last night and bought a skein of silk, a skein of thread, two buttons, a pair of slippers, and a tin pan for the stove. The fire kept all night. We have now got four dollars and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and borrow three dollars, so that I may ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... I was going, and asked me many questions, which I had some trouble in answering. But at last it was night again, and the old woman went to bed and left me. Then I went on tiptoe to the kitchen, and found a skein of thread and two ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... which he first washed in a solution of potash, and then with water, and after drying dipped them in the acids. The acid mixture used consisted of 3 parts by weight of sulphuric to 1 part of nitric acid, and were prepared some time before use. The cotton was dipped one skein at a time, stirred for a few minutes, pressed out, steeped, and excess of acid removed by washing with water, then with dilute potash, and finally with water. Von Lenk's process was used in England at Faversham (Messrs Hall's Works), but was given up on account ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... Fanny, even when at school, had shrunk aloof. At other moments there was something so absent and distracted about her, or so fantastic and incoherent, that Vaudemont, with the man's hard, worldly eye, read in it nothing but melancholy confusion. Nevertheless, if the skein of ideas was entangled, each thread in itself was a ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... doing laborious work, it was customary with The Lifter, as well as with our hero, to sit among the women and assist them in such offices as the peeling of turnips or potatoes; and holding the yarn skein whilst one of the women rolled the thread into a ball; or in scouring the knives and forks. One afternoon while all the men save The Lifter were absent, the group was seated round a small open fire. Hanging from the crane was ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... laughed the little lady. "Come here my Gonerilla, and hold my skein for me. Signor Graziano is going to charm us with one of his ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... liked it, sir, if there had been a bottle of gin in the bedroom!" Here Mr. Prosper hid his face among the bedclothes. "It ain't all that comes silk out of the skein that does to ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... laughed, his eyes jeering. "You operate? Do you think that they want you to cut a skein of silk with a pair of scissors? Cut off a man's arm . . . how far would you go ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... Bel Bree, was glad to come into this nest-warm pleasantness, when the mother must leave it for a while. It was not an irksomeness flung by, like a tangled skein, for somebody else to tug at and unravel; it was a joy ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... all his grievous sins, a splendour which no criminal in the world's history has ever achieved. I beg you therefore to suspend your judgment, until I have finished, as far as my poor powers allow, my unravelling of his tangled skein. And pray remember too that I have sought all through to present you with the facts PARI PASSU with my knowledge of them. I have tried to tell the story through myself. I could think of no other way of creating an essential verisimilitude. Yet, even now, writing in the light of full knowledge, ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... transmigration of souls, drew much support from it; and the modern modification of the latter theory as set forth by Wordsworth and Lessing, are distinctly derived from the same source. Rightly elucidated, the philosophical historian will find in it an invaluable clue to the unravelment of the tangled skein of human endeavor. ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... skein of tangled floss they lie, (You always said they should have been a girl's.) The tears will come—you cannot quite tell why— They fall unheeded on that mass—his curls. Poor little silken skein, so dear to you. "'Twere better short," the wiser father said, "He's ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... a white background in a good light. Select, as a test color, a skein of light green color, such as would be obtained by mixing a pure green with white. Ask the examinee to select and pick out from the heap all those skeins which appear to him to be of the same color, whether of ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... this to do. At home it was not the occupation he generally chose; but now, as he stood with the blue wool encircling two chairs, steadily unwinding it into a ball, it seemed quite pleasant work. Mrs. Estcourt had quite made up her mind, that the skein would be spoiled, and so when her little nephew brought it to her, wound and unbroken, it was an agreeable surprise, and she began to have a higher opinion ...
— Left at Home - or, The Heart's Resting Place • Mary L. Code
... because you have interrupted me. Ah! there, you have tangled my hair. How provoking you are! It will take me an hour to put it right. You are not satisfied with being a prodigy of impiety, but you must also tangle my hair. Come, hold out your hands and take this skein of wool. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... their direction, till, on the brink of the wide grass terrace just below their observer's parapet, they paused a moment and faced each other in closer speech. This interchange of words, though brief in measure of time, lasted long enough to add a vivid strand to Mrs. Ansell's thickening skein; then, on a gesture of the lady's, and without signs of formal leave-taking, the young man struck into a path which regained the entrance avenue, while his companion, quickening her pace, crossed the grass terrace and mounted the wide stone ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... picture of the one; a glance at almost any paper will convince us of the weakness of the other. Decay appears to have seized on the organ of popular government in every land; and this just at the moment when we begin to bring to it, as to an oracle of justice, the whole skein of our private affairs to be unravelled, and ask it, like a new Messiah, to take upon itself our frailties and play for us the part that should be played by our own virtues. For that, in few words, is the case. We cannot trust ourselves to behave with decency; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were almost as eager and excited over the last stages of the journey to the summit as though it lay before them personally, new, unknown and untried. They hardly could wait to resume their following out of the last entangled skein of the ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... very amusing, and you may be useful if you like, very;' and she offered him a skein of silk, which ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... did not for a moment question that he was right, nor wish to disobey; but she had become very much interested, and was a good deal annoyed at having such a sudden stop put to her pleasure. She said nothing, and went on with her work. In a little while Alice asked her to hold a skein of cotton for her while she wound it. Ellen was annoyed again at the interruption; the harpstrings were jarring yet, and gave fresh discord to every touch. She had, however, no mind to let her vexation be seen; she went immediately and held the cotton, ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... earth he drew his revolver from his belt, and bending low, one hand on the ground, he crept around the base of the tower. His feet became entangled in the roots of the tamarisks which the wind had bared, and which sunk in the earth like a tangled skein of black serpents. Each time that he was stopped by a mesh of roots, each time that a stone rolled down or made a sound, he stopped, holding his breath. He was trembling, not with fear, but with the eagerness ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of grand use to him. His tinder-box enabled him to strike a light: it showed him two things that made his heart bound with delight, none the less thrilling for being somewhat vague. Attached to the arrow was a skein of silk, and on the arrow itself were ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... poems of mortal misery trouble me no more now; that was of old, when I looked out into nothing—cold and stiff, snow-drifts in my heart. Now a black cat plays with it in the sunshine, as though with a rolling skein, and I like to see its rolling. I will give you, at the end of this letter, a few more verses belonging to that period, of which fragmentary copies are still preserved, as I see, in my portfolio. You may allow me to read them still; they harm me no more. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... to be answered. Had he known at the moment how deeply the two of them were to be enmeshed in the skein of Europe's destiny he would have risen and faced the anger of his host, or, risking detection, incontinently fled. But Marishka's hand clasped his own, ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... sufficient zeal in the task required of him under the new policy; that his sovereign was seriously annoyed at what he conceived to be wilful procrastination in the withdrawal of the army; and that he was now sending his own aide-de-camp to cut the Gordian knot in the tangled skein ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... gesture to show that the matter was beyond his comprehension, and ascended the steps of the hotel. Jennings, deep in thought, walked away, wondering how he was to disentangle the skein which Fate had placed in his hand ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... days his brain was a swarm of paradoxes, subtleties and hair-splittings, a skein of rules as complicated as the articles of the codes that involved the sense of everything, indulged in puns and ended in a most tenuous and singular celestial jurisprudence. The abstract side vanished, in its turn, and ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Coventry-Blue. A kind of blue thread manufactured at Coventry and formerly much used for embroidery, &c. cf. Greene's James IV (1592), IV, iii, where Slipper ordering a doublet cries: 'Edge me the sleeves with Coventry blue.' Ben Jonson, Gipsies Metamorph. (1621), speaks of 'A skein of ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... clear, to look through, but it was another case altogether, no more like the other one than a apple-pie is like a mug o' cider. An' then they both took it up, an' they swung it around between them, till it was all twisted an' knotted an' wound up, an' tangled, worse than a skein o' yarn in a nest o' kittens, an' then they give it ...
— Rudder Grange • Frank R. Stockton
... she related all the particulars of her ill-omened vision to her husband; and the latter, after a short pause, informed her and his friend that a terrible calamity was about to befall them. He then drew from his travelling wallet a skein of thread. This he divided into three parts, one for each, and told his companions that in case of grievous bodily injury, the bit of thread wound round the wounded part would instantly make it whole. After which he taught them the Mantra,[FN158] or mystical word by which the ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... I could see that her eyes were directed to that part of my person, and fixed upon the increasing distention of my trousers. In a few minutes she gave me a skein of worsted to hold, and desired me to kneel in front of her, so as to bring my hands down to the level of the low chair on which ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... that was, and all that might have been, Of all the sorrow that his sword had wrought, Of Death that now drew near him: of the green Vales of Larissa, where, with such a queen, With such a love as now his spear had slain, He had been happy, who must wind the skein Of grievous wars, and ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... Guildea. Strangely enough, it was a sentiment of pity. He pitied this hard-working, eminently successful man of big brain and bold heart, who never seemed depressed, who never wanted assistance, who never complained of the twisted skein of life or faltered in his progress along its way. The Father pitied Guildea, in fact, because Guildea wanted so little. He had told him so, for the intercourse of the two men, from the ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the last scene in our history, and I know not how to do it, for of all the events of the life it is to me the most dreamy and unreal. The figures of our drama flit before me like shadows. It was like a knotted skein slowly unravelling. It was as the ice becomes water, and runs silently away. It was as the gorgeous, roseate cloud lifts itself up, and then changes in color and hides beyond the horizon. It was as a carriage and traveller fade from sight on the distant ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... his normal self also. He had sworn to himself that he would not tell Elizabeth he loved her, until he had succeeded in unravelling the tangled skein ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... sat down on the floor before an easy-chair, through a rent in the old covering of which the hair was escaping, and drawing from her pocket a needle and a skein of worsted, she set to work to mend it. For three days past she had been waiting for an hour's time to do this piece of mending, ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... I'd clung to Duty's apron strings I felt like leavin' the event. And when Miss Meechim come in I wuz settin' calm and serene in a big chair windin' some clouded blue and white yarn, Aronette holdin' the skein. I'd brung along a lot of woollen yarn to knit Josiah some socks on the way, to ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... people, to "Miss Coventry, Dangerfield Hall"? How my fingers trembled as I untied the thread and unfolded the paper; after all, it was nothing but a packet of worsteds! To be sure, I hadn't ordered any worsteds, but there might possibly be a note to explain; so I shook every skein carefully, and turned the covering inside out, that the document, if there should be one, might not escape my vigilance. How could my presentiments deceive me? Of course there was a note—after all, where was the harm? Captain Lovell had most politely sent ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... presume that arises from not knowing how to proceed. I have a skein to unravel, and cannot find out an end ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... itself is corrupt. But it may sometimes be doubted whether Michael Angelo could himself have done more than indicate the general drift of his thought, or have disengaged his own conception from the tangled skein of elliptical and ungrammatical sentences in which he has enveloped it. The form of Campanella's poetry, though often grotesque, is always clear. Michael Angelo has left too many of his compositions in the same state as his marbles—unfinished and colossal abbozzi, which lack the final ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... said Grace conservatively, starting to wind another skein of wool. "But if we have all those things I think we ought ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... eight care heir obey weight bare their prey freight fare there weigh neigh hair where sleigh veins fair stair reign whey chair pear skein rein pair ...
— How to Teach Phonics • Lida M. Williams
... her wear her Precious Toy, And I 'll rejoice to see her joy: Her bauble 's only one degree Less frail, less fugitive than we, For time, ere long, will snap the skein, And scatter ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... drifts the fallen skein Of some tired spider, looped and blown, As fragile as a strand of rain, Across the air, and upward thrown By breaths of hayfields newly mown— So glimmering it is and fine, I doubt ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... make people sympathise with virtue is a vulgar trick that any common fellow can do; but it is not everybody who can take a scoundrel, and cause us to weep and whimper over him as though he were a very saint. Give a young lady of five years old a skein of silk and a brace of netting-needles, and she will in a short time turn you out a decent silk purse—anybody can; but try her with a sow's ear, and see whether she can make a silk purse out of THAT. That is the work for your real great artist; and pleasant it is to see how many ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... | pohr oo'noo yahr'doh? This will do | Tio cxi tauxgos | tee'oh chee tahw'gohss I will take this | Mi tion prenos | mee tee'ohn preh'nohss A reel of cotton | Unu bobeno da kotono | oonoo bo-beh'no dah | | ko-toh'no A skein | Fadenaro | fahdeh-nah'ro A packet of mixed | Paketo da miksitaj | pahkeh'toh dah pins | pingloj | miksee'tahy peen'gloy Not so fine | Ne tiel delikata | neh tee'ehl | | dehleekah'tah Show me some | Montru al mi gantojn | mohntroo ahl mee gloves | | gahn'toyn Try on ...
— Esperanto Self-Taught with Phonetic Pronunciation • William W. Mann
... washing and ironing; and happy did the young exquisite deem himself, whose shirts came with such faultless plaits, such snowy freshness, from the slender hands of Mary. With that matchless gift which old Yankee housewives call faculty, Mary kept together all the ends of her ravelled skein of life, and began to make them wind smoothly. Her baby was the neatest of all babies, as it was assuredly the prettiest, and her little Fred the handiest and most universal genius of all boys. It was Fred that could wring out all the stockings, and hang ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... was the most urgent, task. But it was complicated, adjourned, and finally botched by interweaving it with a mutilated scheme for the complete readjustment of the politico-social forces of the planet. The result was a tangled skein of problems, most of them still unsolved, and some insoluble by governments alone. Out of the confusion of clashing forces towered aloft the two dominant Powers who command the economic resources of the world, and whose democratic institutions and ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... delved long among the chronicles of Normans and Saxons; Stubbs no less laboriously excavated the charters of the Plantagenets; Froude hewed his path through the State papers of the Tudors; while Gardiner patiently unravelled the tangled skein of Stuart misgovernment. John Richard Green, one of the youngest of the school, took a wider subject, the continuous history of the English people. He was fortunate in writing at a time when the public ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... on the strength of their supposed birthright of "genius," have ended where they began; flattered into the vain belief that they were men at eighteen or twenty, and finding out at fifty that they were and always had been nothing more than boys. It was but a tangled skein of life that Motley's book showed us at twenty-five, and older men might well have doubted whether it would ever be wound off in any continuous thread. To repeat his own words, he had crowded together the ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... mere truism to remark that in every political question the main controversy is complicated by a number of side issues. Thus in the tangled skein of politics in South Eastern Europe there is not merely the great struggle between the Crescent and the Cross, but there are also jealousies between Greek and Bulgarian, between Servian and Austrian, which have to be considered. So in Ireland, if we take ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... of Baron Snorch filled so large a page in the history of European diplomacy that the publication of his recent memoirs was awaited with profound interest by half the chancelleries of Europe. (Even the other half were half excited over them.) The tangled skein in which the politics of Europe are enveloped was perhaps never better illustrated than in this fascinating volume. Even at the risk of repeating what is already familiar, I offer the following for what it is worth—or ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... once when this was done, —Vanished the skein, the needle bare,— She dressed with wreaths vermilion Bright as a trumpet's dazzling blare. Nor knew that in Queen Dido's hair, Loading the Carthaginian air, Ancestral blossoms flamed as fair As any ever hanging there. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... subnormal to meet this criterion may lead him to break common conventions, and to appear disrespectful, sulky, stubborn, or in some other way queer and exceptional. He is likely to be misunderstood, because he so easily misunderstands others. The skein of human motives is too complex for his limited ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... where the jagged cliffs of the Superstitions sweep down to the gorge of the Salagua and Hell's Hip Pocket bars the river's sweep, he saw that vague, impalpable haze—a smoke, a dust, a veil of the lightest skein, stirred idly by some wandering wind, perhaps, or marking the trail of sheep. And as he looked upon it his melancholy gaze changed to a staring, hawk-like intentness; he leaned forward in the saddle and Chapuli ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... every sound: a footstep in the hall, the shutting of a door, a voice calling in the street. And yet, Martha was guilty of performing only what she considered to be her bounden duty. It is the prerogative of fate to tangle or untangle the skein of human lives; but still, there are those who elect themselves to break the news gently, to lessen the shock of the blow which ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... of the writer of fiction, to depict the misunderstandings which arise between two persons, through the sin of one, or the folly of both, or the villainy of a third; then comes the means by which the tangled skein is unravelled, and in the end everything is satisfactorily explained, and the sorely-tried characters are ushered into a happiness stronger and sweeter than ever before. Friends quarrel, and are miserable in their state of separation; and afterward, ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... that the ancients gave up the exploration of the Nile when they came to the countless windings and difficulties of the marshes; the river is like an entangled skein of thread. Wind light; course S. 20 degrees W. The strong north wind that took us from Khartoum has long since become a mere breath. It never blows in this latitude regularly from the north. The wind commences at between 8 ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... without more ado, and I set off for the castle, troubled for my unreadiness in woman nature, the most puzzling, calling, captivating skein in all the universe, because it holds, behind the silken veil of its treasure-house, the eternal mystery of creation, that something divine which ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... and 5 feet long, tied together with string or bark cloth at two opposite points, so as to form a belt of between 2 feet and 2 feet 6 inches in length. For better description I would liken it to a skein of wool, as it looks when held on the hands of one person for the purpose of being wound off into a ball by someone else, but which, instead of being wound off, is tied up at the two points where it passes round the ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... of colour, a picture on which various colours are painted is placed before the patient, as well as a skein of wool of the same shade as one of the colours in the picture, which he is ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... heart and brain. Passion hath made me restless and longing consumes my soul And tears discover the secret that else concealed had lain. I know of no way to ease me of sickness and care and woe, Nor can my weak endeavour reknit love's severed skein. The fire of my heart with yearnings and longing grief is fed And for its heat, the lover to live in hell is fain. O thou that thinkest to blame me for what betides me, enough; God knows I suffer with patience whate'er He doth ordain. I swear I shall ne'er ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... of silk the whirling spoles reveal, If smiling Fortune turn the giddy wheel; But if sweet Love with baby-fingers twines, 130 And wets with dewy lips the lengthening lines, Skein after skein celestial tints unfold, And all the ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... thrown into the dye pot. The winding must be close enough to prevent the dye penetrating to the yarn. This means, of course, when the clouding is to be of white and another color. If it is to be two shades of one color, as a light and medium blue, the skein is first dyed a light blue, and after drying, is wound as I have described, and thrown again into the dye pot, until the unwound portions become the darker ...
— Hand-Loom Weaving - A Manual for School and Home • Mattie Phipps Todd
... been lying to Your Honor. He has said that the British are helpless. He brought Your Honor a report from Palestine that was a skein of falsehood hung up on little pegs of truth. He told you the British are not able to defend themselves, he knowing better; for he is one of those men who say always what the ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... bark, the same of sumach berries, and a peck of walnut hulls or bark; put a layer of this in an iron pot, and a layer of the wool, till all is in; cover it with water, and boil it slowly for three hours, keeping the pot filled with water; then hang it out, and when dry, wash one skein, and if it is not dark enough, strain the dye, and put in a tea-cup of copperas; put in the yarn, and let it scald a few minutes; take it out, dry it, and wash it well with soft soap ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... is necessary—the committal of the soul to God. Look that thou thyself art in order, and leave to God the task of unraveling the skein of the world and of destiny. What do annihilation or immortality matter? What is to be, will be. And what will be, will be for the best. Faith in good—perhaps the individual wants nothing more for his passage through life. Only he must have taken sides with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in her hands, and could stop to stroke Patty's hair and kiss her "lips like snips of scarlet," which made the little girl happier than anything else in the world. Mr. Starbird sat in a large armchair, holding a skein of yarn for Dorcas, who sat in a small ...
— Little Grandmother • Sophie May
... doses. The fruit is emollient by virtue of the large quantity of mucilage it contains, but it is more interesting for other properties. When cut in two, deprived of epidermis and seeds, and washed until none of the mucilage remains, there is left a fibrous skeleton, a sort of skein of interwoven nets that constitutes the so-called vegetable sponge. It serves the same purpose as a sponge and has the advantages that its fibers do not rot and that they are easily kept clean. In view of its cheapness and plentifulness in the ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... your Southern bowers, And weave, amid the incense of the flowers, The skein of fair romance—the gain ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... her. I am not supposed to know that she is a visitor to Rickwell. He'll suspect our game if I chatter about her, Ware. We must be cautious. This is a difficult skein to unravel." ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... well aware that you are crazy, perhaps you can inform me what caused you to become so." "Oh yes," replied he, "I can soon tell you that: first my father died, then my mother, and soon after my only sister hung herself to the limb of a tree with a skein of worsted yarn; and last, and worst of all, my wife, Dorcas Jane, drowned herself in Otter Creek." Wondering if there was any truth in this horrible story, or if it was only the creation of his own diseased mind, I said, merely to ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... Democrates's eyes grew like bright coals as he gazed on her. He saw her clear high forehead, he heard—or thought he heard despite the jar of the street—the rustle of the muslin robe. Hermione passed, nor ever knew how, by taking this way from the house of a friend, she coloured the skein of life for three mortals—for herself, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... she assented, with a smile. She kept him waiting with what would have looked like coquettish hesitation in another, while she glanced at the windows overhead, pierced by a skein of converging wires. "Suppose I go up ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... youth; and something worth even more, though that was a loss he was not yet ready to admit. Worst of all, she had him convinced that he was a failure, a weakling and misfit, a sort of green fool who had asked for the moon and been properly punished for his temerity. And that was a skein even fairies would find ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... the literary world, he was regarded by superior persons as a writer of "shockers," he had a large and increasing public who were fascinated by the wholesome and thrilling stories he wrote, and who held on breathlessly to the skein of mystery until they came to ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... home, alas! did foes more deadly wait Than Saladin's fierce crew. The lamp of love Was changed for one of hate, which threw Its false and fatal skein of light above. A shuddering shock, a fearful crash, foretold ...
— Rowena & Harold - A Romance in Rhyme of an Olden Time, of Hastyngs and Normanhurst • Wm. Stephen Pryer
... lost herself in wonderment and in thoughts which, in her woman's brain, were tangled like a skein of thread. ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... slight thing should have trapped his fantasy surprised her. After she had written it, it had seemed remote, all too white, a "Symphonie en Blanc Majeur"—as Theophile Gautier would have called it—besides devoid of human interest. But Arthur had interwoven a human strand of melody, a scarlet skein of emotion, primal withal, yet an attempt to catch the under emotions of the ice-bound Esquimaux surprised in their zone of silence by the sleep of the Shadow, the long night of their dreary winter. And the composer had succeeded surprisingly well. What boreal ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... the skein; of course the thread Got tangled, snarled and twisted; "Have Patience!" cried the artless maid, To ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... mortal like the barbarians, for you have been a force ruling the sea, and the flowers, and the winds, and twisting the blood of man and woman in your fingers like a living skein of soft red silk. They will always worship you. It may not be in temples any longer, not with a studied liturgy, but wherever the sap rises in a flower, or the joy of life swims up in the morning through the broken film of dreams, ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... history of such a collection is difficult indeed, for it has drawn upon all civilizations and all literatures. But since Hammer-Purgstall and De Sacy began to unwind the skein, many additional turns have been given. The idea of the "frame" in general comes undoubtedly from India; and such stories as 'The Barber's Fifth Brother,' 'The Prince and the Afrit's Mistress,' have been "traced back to the Hitopadesa, Panchatantra, and Katha Sarit Sagara." The 'Story ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... opening his eyes was, "I am in the land of the lions!" And—well, why should we not say it?—at the idea that lions were nigh hereabouts, within a couple of steps, almost at hand's reach, and that he would have to disentangle a snarled skein with them, ugh! a deadly chill struck him, and he dived intrepidly under ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... offer good chances for humor, particularly the funny story, for humor with a genuine point is not trivial. But do not spin a whole skein of humorous yarns with no more connection than the inane and threadbare "And that reminds me." An anecdote without bearing may be funny but one less funny that fits theme and occasion is far preferable. There is ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... bright Broadway, you of the chorus, Who sing in the hope of forgetting your pain: I turn to a sister of Sainted Cecilia, A white bird escaping the earth's tangled skein:— The music of God is her innermost brooding, The whispering angels ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... travels through a small, round hole something like the eye of a needle so that any knots or rough places can be detected. If the threads are found to be strong and without flaws two to half a dozen of them are put together in a loose skein and they are twisted in a doubling machine. Afterward the thread is polished, cleaned, and run off on spools or bobbins. That is the road Mother's spools of cotton have to travel before they get to her. How seldom we think of this ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... anything we ever dreamed at Hamley, Faith? Yet here am I set, and here shall I stay till the skein be ravelled out. Soon I shall go into the desert upon a mission to the cities of the South, to Dongola, Khartoum, and Darfur and beyond; for there is trouble yonder, and war is near, unless it is given to me to bring peace. So I must bend to my study of Arabic, which I am thankful ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... she not lack half a score or a dozen front teeth she might pass and make a figure among the fairest. I say nothing of her lips, for they are so thin that, were it the fashion to reel lips, one might make a skein of them; but, being of a different color from what is usual in lips, they have a marvellous appearance, for they are streaked with blue, green, and orange-tawny. Pardon me, good my lord governor, if I paint so minutely the parts of her who is about to become my daughter; for in truth I love and ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of this cloudless October morning Colonel Montgomery Byrne, "of the old Army, sir," was reviling the fates that had set him the task of unraveling such a skein as he found at Sandy. At six he was blessing the stars that sent him. Awakened, much before his usual hour, by half-heard murmur of scurry and excitement, so quickly suppressed he believed it all a dream, he was thinking, half drowsily, all painfully, of ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... boy employed, the good woman had borrowed a reel of a neighbor, and set him to work winding thread. The contrivance greatly delighted him. He examined it with the utmost care, pushing it up and down, to fit it for a larger or smaller skein, much to the amusement of ...
— Bertie and the Gardeners - or, The Way to be Happy • Madeline Leslie
... worldly contact with them. I at any rate will be firm. I say to you now no more than I said, ah, so many times, when it was still possible that my words should not be vain. They were vain. But not on that account am I to be changed. I will not be wound like a skein of silk round your little finger.' That was it. Was she to give way in everything because they had been successful among them in carrying out this marriage in opposition to her judgment? Was she to assent that this man be treated as a sheep because he had prevailed against ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... I thought I did about the bigness of London, I found that morning that I never had any idea of what an everlasting town it is. It is like a skein of tangled yarn—there doesn't seem to be any end to it. Going in this way from Nelson's Monument out into the country, it was amazing to see how long it took to get there. We would go out of the busy streets into a quiet rural neighborhood, or what looked like ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... Thou liest, thou thread, Thou thimble, Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail! Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket thou! Brav'd in mine own house with a skein of thread! Away! thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant, Or I shall so be-mete thee with thy yard As thou shalt think on prating whilst thou liv'st! I tell thee, I, that thou hast ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... his pocket Tom took a room at the Marlboro and spent the remainder of that day, and all the days of the fortnight following, wrestling mightily with the lawyers in winding up the tangled skein of Chiawassee affairs. Propped in his bed at Warwick Lodge, the bed he had not left since the night of violence, Duxbury Farley signed everything that was offered to him, and the obstacles to a settlement ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... a skein of silk, and, extending it to M. de Bois, she said: "Will you assist me? It is for Bertha I am working. Will you hold this skein? It ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... been agreeably surprised at the development of the situation between the child and his mother. He had been obliged to go into town the day after Eleanor's first unfortunate encounter with her hostess, and had hurried home in fear and trembling to try to smooth out any tangles in the skein of their relationship that might have resulted from a day in each other's vicinity. After hurrying over the house and through the grounds in search of her he finally discovered the child companionably currying a damp and afflicted ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... collected into one of her small white hands, those splendid threads whose naturally ardent brightness was doubled in the sunshine. When the pretty lady's-maid pulled a comb of ivory into the midst of the undulating and golden waves of that enormously magnificent skein of silk, one might have said that a thousand sparks of fire darted forth and coruscated away from it in all directions. The sunshine, too, reflected not less golden and fiery rays from numerous clusters of spiral ringlets, which, divided ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... mantel-piece is furnished with a brass or iron arm, turning on pivots in a plate fastened to the lintel, and notched along its upper edge. From this arm, which is turned back against the lintel when not in use, the meat is hung and turned by means of a bottle-jack or a skein of worsted, knotted in three or four places, which answers the purpose equally well, and may be replaced by a new one when required, at a merely nominal cost. Meat roasted in this manner should be turned ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... her thoughts to Morningside Park she perceived the tangled skein of life was now to be further complicated ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... then, some months before, that Bashley being away for a day's holiday, Antoine took his place at the scale; for it was a slack time, and few workpeople were there to be served. He believed he had given out the last skein of silk, and had weighed the last bobbin, so shutting the slide, and putting up the bar, he unlocked an inner door, and went into the house and up the stairs. Pausing on the first landing, as he frequently did, to look thoughtfully over the balustrade and down the well-staircase, ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... chance of better things; and I say once more I like not the thoughts of the close quarters they intend for us. An' you will not run for it yourself, at least help a poor fellow, whose ideas are like a skein of tangled silk, to ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... either, my little Delphine. Look up and let me kiss away the tears. There! I shall find my wits and unravel this skein of your husband's winding." ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... G. Mackay wrote tales of history under the title of "The Skein of Life." Father Morgan M. Sheedy and Rev. Dr. George Hodges, who used to strive together in Pittsburgh to surpass each other in tearing down the walls of religious prejudice that keep people out of the Kingdom ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... carnation red, And rock the silver lining, And rock my baby softly, too, With skein of silk entwining. Come, O Sleep, from Chio's Isle! And take my little ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... that a skein of silk she wanted for her work was not in her basket. She turned to look also in her old inlaid workbox, which stood on a small table beside her. But it ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... all, not at all," said Oldbuck, resuming the subject of his disquisition"the human mind is to be treated like a skein of ravelled silk, where you must cautiously secure one free end before you can make ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... weave, but I cannot see Just how 'tis done, and it puzzles me. For you have no loom In your little room. No silken skein, no spinning-wheel, No ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... are." Cleek's voice was absent-minded, for his thoughts were working, and already he was beginning to tie the broken threads of the skein that he had gathered into a rough cord, with here and there a gap that must—and should—be filled. It was strange enough, in all conscience. Here were these underground tunnels leading, "if you kept to the right," from a field ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... sido, situacio. Sitting (of assembly) kunsido. Situation situacio, sido. Situation (post) oficio. Six ses. Sixteen dek-ses. Sixty sesdek. Size grandeco. Size (of a book) formato. Size glueto. Skate gliti. Skates glitiloj. Skein fadenaro. Skeleton skeleto. Sketch skizi. Sketch skizo. Skewer trapikileto. Skid malakcelo. Skiff boateto. Skilful lerta. Skill lerteco. Skilled lerta. Skim sensxauxmigi. Skimmer sxauxmkulero. Skin hauxto. Skin (animal) felo. Skin senfeligi. Skinner felisto. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... stewardess, and it extended to the bridge, where Captain Boynton frequently consigned his duties to the first officer in order to devote his energies to holding Mrs. Weston's worsted. When he was not holding the skein, he was holding the ball, and during the endless process of winding and unwinding he spun his own yarns, recalling tales of wild adventure that alternately shocked ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... four shades of scarlet, four ditto of crimson, four ditto of amber, four ditto of peach, three ditto of stone-colours, three ditto of blue, three ditto of blue greens, three ditto of yellow greens, and one skein of white embroidery silk or ...
— The Lady's Album of Fancy Work for 1850 • Unknown
... of the room to put on her things, upsetting as she did so, the work-box with which she had been masquerading, and quite unconscious of it. Winnington, smiling to himself, stooped to pick up the reels and skeins of silk. One, a skein of pink silk with which she had been working, he held in his hand a moment, and, suddenly, put in his pocket. After which he drifted absently to the hearthrug, and stood waiting for her, hat in hand. He was thinking of that moment in the wintry ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... permitted to behold. In spite of my feelings, I had to sit in the dining-room and converse with Pimenovna, one of the poor relations. Sasha, looking worried and excited, kept running by me with a thimble, a skein of wool or some ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... contention he alone was the unerring Pathfinder of the People. There can, indeed, be no right conception of Washington that does not accord him a great and extraordinary genius. I will not say he could have produced a play of Shakespeare, or a poem of Milton, handled with Kant the tangled skein of metaphysics, probed the secrecies of mind and matter with Bacon, constructed a railroad or an engine like Stephenson, wooed the electric spark from heaven to earth with Franklin, or walked with Newton the pathways of ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... bleating of little machinery the murmur of the human heart drifted in and out of McLean's hearing; fragments of home talk, tendernesses, economies, intimate first names, and dinner hours, and whether it was joy or sadness, it was in common; the world seemed knit in a single skein of home ties. Two or three came by whose purses must have been slender, and whose purchases were humble and chosen after much nice adjustment; and when one plain man dropped a word about both ends ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... As I read the earlier part of the passage I confess that I imagined the conclusion was going to be very different from what it proved to be. Fresh from the study of the older men and also of Mr. Darwin himself, I failed to see that Mr. Darwin had "unravelled and illuminated" a tangled skein, but believed him, on the contrary, to have tangled and obscured what his predecessors had made in great part, if not wholly, plain. With the older writers, I had felt as though in the hands of men who wished to understand themselves ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... cut into short threads, never more than half the length of the skein. If a long needleful is used, it is not only apt to pull the work, but is very wasteful, as the end of it is liable to become frayed or knotted before it is nearly worked up. If it is necessary to use it double (and for coarse work, such as screen panels on sailcloth, or for embroidering ...
— Handbook of Embroidery • L. Higgin
... resting on the edges of the tub or vat. These sticks are best made of hickory, but ash or beech or any hard wood that can be worked smooth and which does not swell much when treated with water may be used. The usual method of working is to hang the skein on the stick, spreading it out as much as possible, then immerse the yarn in the liquor, lift it up and down two or three times to fully wet out the yarn, then turn the yarn over on the stick and repeat the dipping processes, then allow to steep in the dye-liquor. This is done ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... its means, that they pelted him with stones and had nearly killed him. He nevertheless went on inventing, and next produced a machine for weaving flowered silks, with a contrivance for giving a dressing to the thread, so as to render that of each bobbin or skein of ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... you to-day?" asked Lizzie Gordon, who was seated at the window winding up a ball of worsted, the skein of which was being held by Miss Puff, who was at that time residing ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... when thou didst go by chance to her, she was ready for thee. But if this is all she knows, it goes not far. Still it may help—it may help. In a tangled web, no one may say which will be the thread which patiently followed may unravel the skein." ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... of the Fabian Society, deeply stirred by the tremendous social import of this movement, banded themselves together to unravel the tangled skein of women's economic subjection and to discover how its knots were tied. The first step was to get women to speak out, to analyse their own difficulties and hindrances as matters boldly to be faced. Whatever the truth may turn out to be with regard to ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... out on the 28th January 1547, when the tyrant breathed his last, and left his two wives and two daughters to unravel the skein which he had so persistently entangled for them. Katharine Parr took her fate immediately into her own hands, and thirty-five days after Henry's death, secretly married her former admirer, Sir Thomas, now Lord Seymour, who was described by Hayward as "fierce in courage, courtly in ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... thread of the story bears a certain similarity to that of Mysterier, Vicioria, and Pan, being a love affair of mazy windings, a tangled skein of loves-me-loves-me-not. But it is pure comedy throughout. Rolandsen, the telegraph operator in love with Elsie Mack, is no poet; he has not even any pretensions to education or social standing. He is ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... she. "Three yards more would finish, and now I shall have to go down to the village and buy a whole skein, just ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... a special talent for adding new complications to a difficult situation, so as to render it impossible of solution. He has now so completely tangled up the parliamentary skein, that in a little while it will be impossible for Parliament to govern. Can one conceive of a majority of the Chamber rallying around the Catholic centre, or the socialists, for the same reason, increasing in number ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... of thread is a promise of warmth and protection for years to come. Then the wool-white yarn is dyed in colors symbolizing the strength of the navy, the loyalty of the army or the honor of the alma mater. Reeled into a skein, the wool is now all but ready for the fingers of the knitter; it has but to be wound in a ball. Yet here danger lurks. An inadvertent twist or a simple tangle quickly knots the thread, unless thoughtful patience rescues. Recklessness means hopeless disarray, and the soft fluff of warming ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... e.g., Neugebauer, "Beobachtungen aus dem Gebiete des Scheinzwittertumes," Jahrbuch fuer Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Jahrgang iv, 1902, esp. p. 92.) At the same time this is only one thread in the tangled skein with which we are here concerned. The mass of facts which meets us when we turn to the study of modesty in women cannot be dismissed as a group of artificially-imposed customs. They gain rather than lose in importance if we have to realize that the organic sexual demands of women, calling ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the rising tide lapped up the sands at the back of the Bar. The faint yellow-pink after-thought of sunrise and pencillings of tarnished cloud alike had vanished into the all-obtaining misty blue of the upper sky. Heading for the French coast, a skein of wild geese passed in wedge-shaped formation with honking cries and the beat of strong-winged flight. The barrow creaked again, wheeled some few yards further ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Try we life-long, we can never Straighten out life's tangled skein, Why should we, in vain endeavour, Guess and ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... himself,—she had enticed him on in a thousand ways,—most especially by the amazing "grip" she had of scientific problems in which he was interested and which puzzled him, but which she seemed to unravel as easily as she might unravel a skein of wool. Her clear brightness of brain and logical precision of argument first surprised him into unqualified admiration, calling to his mind the assertion of a renowned physiologist that "From the beginning woman had lived in another world than man. Formed ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... upon the tide of passion all the lurking fiends which, in times of peace and order, society spurns.... Every one of us is entangled in the tentacles of the octopus. Every one of us discovers in himself the same confusion of good and of bad impulses, knotted and intertwined. A tangled skein. Who shall unravel it?... Thence comes the feeling of inexorable fate by which, in such crises, men are overwhelmed. Nevertheless this feeling derives merely from their own despondency in face of the efforts ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... stairs, sometimes beckoning him to her side when she was busy about her household tasks on the pretense of requiring his assistance. On one occasion she even went so far as to inveigle him into holding a skein of wool about his clumsy hands, while she wound the violet worsted into a ball, and delicately inquired if he believed Samuel spoke the truth when he had protested that he had never paid court to any ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... first fled. She ran to the glass to know if the restoration she felt might also be seen. With unbiassed calculation the black-fringed lids drew apart and one hand pushed back of the temple, and held there, a tangled skein of hair that had thrown the dusk of a deep wood about her eyes. Then, as she looked, came the little dreaming smile that unfitted critic eyes for their office; a smile that wakened to a laugh as she looked—a little womanish chuckle of confident ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... evidence that the conscious experience of others is conditioned like our own. For better understanding let us have recourse to a homely analogy: let us think of these more or less parallel lines of individual experience in the semblance of the strands of a skein of flax. Now if, at the present moment, this skein were cut with a straight knife at right angles to its length, the cut end would represent the time plane—that is, the present moment of all—and it would be the same for all providing that the time plane were flat ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... that for your mother," said Mrs. Durrant, looking at him again keenly, as she transferred the skein. "Yes, it goes ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... is able to unravel the tangled skein of crime and hypocrisy among individuals can it be extended to communities and nations, as nations are only man in the aggregate, they are the aggregate of his crimes and deception and depravity, and so long as these constitute the basis of individual impulse, so long will they control the ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... I asked, pointing up to a network like a skein of silk twisted in a hundred zigzags across the face of the mountain from bottom to top. "Why, it's like the way up Jack's beanstalk. No sane automobile ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... immense. They slip and slide, and get their legs over the traces, and are dragged up against the rocks; carriage, horses, harness, all a confused heap. The Brave, and I, and the postilion, were constantly at work, in extricating the whole concern from a tangle, like a skein of thread. We broke two thick iron chains, and crushed the box of a wheel, as it was; and the carriage is now undergoing repair, under the window, on the margin of the lake: where a woman in short petticoats, a stomacher, and two immensely long tails of black hair ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... inclination to rebel, her courage fails her, and she gives in, and taking the tangled skein of wool (that reminds her in a vague, sorrowful fashion of her own hapless love story) between her ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... insisted on taking him home to dinner, and when Carl came in he found him holding a skein of wool for Bess while Louise read aloud, and if not quite his usual gay self he was at least more cheerful than he had ...
— The Story of the Big Front Door • Mary Finley Leonard
... winding thread, and it is tangled, we pass the spool across and through the skein, now this way, now that way; even so, to finish off the War, we shall send embassies hither and thither and everywhere, ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... fields, into which one may wander away, and never be seen more. It seemed to me a very simple thing, this gardening; but it opens up astonishingly. It is like the infinite possibilities in worsted-work. Polly sometimes says to me, "I wish you would call at Bobbin's, and match that skein of worsted for me, when you are in town." Time was, I used to accept such a commission with alacrity and self-confidence. I went to Bobbin's, and asked one of his young men, with easy indifference, to give me some ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... is impossible to unravel completely the skein of difficulties in which the people are enmeshed, or to simplify the causes of the tangle. It is easy to blame a person's wretchedness on his individual misconduct and incompetency, to say, for example, that a man's family is sick and poor because he is intemperate. There might be truth in ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... at this moment is hidden from us by a band of clouds, that stretches, right above our head, from one end of the sky to the other, like a long skein of white wool. It is alone in the blue void, and seems to make more peaceful, and even a little mysterious, the wonderful light of the fields we traverse—these fields intoxicated with life and vibrant with the music of birds; while, by contrast, the distant landscape, unshaded ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... the spectroscope. The beams of white sunlight consist of innumerable beams of every hue in intimate association. Every shade of red, of yellow, of blue, and of green, can be found in a sunbeam. The magician's wand, with which we strike the sunbeam and sort the tangled skein into perfect order, is the simple instrument known as the glass prism. We have represented this instrument in its simplest form in the adjoining figure (Fig. 17). It is a piece of pure and homogeneous glass in the shape of a wedge. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... between illusion and reality, and every breast panted with undefined terror, quailing before the awful power that watches secret crimes and winds unseen the skein of destiny. At that moment a cry burst forth from one of the uppermost benches—"Look! look! comrade, yonder are the cranes of Ibycus!" And suddenly there appeared sailing across the sky a dark object which a moment's inspection showed to be a flock of cranes flying directly over the theatre. ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... either in the yarn, warp, skein, or in the piece, the first being more effective. The best and most satisfactory results are achieved when the material treated is made of fine long staple cotton, either Sea Island or Egyptian, the shorter cottons ...
— The Fabric of Civilization - A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States • Anonymous
... a skein of silk, 'The ravelled sleave of care', usually misinterpreted, the equivocal ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... singing: love's old sweet song. Bloom unwound slowly the elastic band of his packet. Love's old sweet sonnez la gold. Bloom wound a skein round four forkfingers, stretched it, relaxed, and wound it round his troubled double, fourfold, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... this country for specifying the size of silk is based on the weight in drams (avoirdupois) of a skein containing 1000 yards. A skein, thus weighing 5 drams, is technically called 5-dram silk. The number of yards of 1-dram silk to a pound must accordingly be 256000. The formulas for figuring the amount of silk required for a piece of ...
— Theory Of Silk Weaving • Arnold Wolfensberger
... holding a skein of yarn for Aunt Lois; and she went on winding in silence, putting the ball ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... was being contracted and drawn into the boat, where it was laid up like some gigantic brown skein, the men who were gathering it in shaking out the sea-weed and small fish that had enmeshed themselves and had forced their unfortunate heads in beyond ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... with Miss Hannah Ross. She would weave a strip of white and one of yellow and one of brown to make it pretty. She had a reel that would pop every time it got to a half skein so she would know to stop and fill it up again. We used copperas and some kind of bark she bought at the store to dye with. It was cotton clothes winter and summer for the slaves, ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... supper, which was already laid on a side-table. Ere they had finished there was a jerk in the fire-smoke, the rising skein of which bulged out into the room, as if some giant had laid his hand on the chimney-top for a moment. It had been caused by the opening of the outer door. A heavy step was now heard in the passage, and Angel ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... more of that, Hal, an thou lovest me," said Pleydell. "But we must have some news from the land of Egypt, if possible. Oh, if I had but hold of the slightest thread of this complicated skein, you should see how I would unravel it!—I would work the truth out of your Bohemian, as the French call them, better than a Monitoire, or a Plainte de Tournelle; I know how to manage ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... the fresh air again. Some progress had been made like the opening of a chess-match between masters, and yet the more Steel thought of it the more muddled and bewildered did he become. No complicated tangle in the way of a plot had ever been anything like the skein this was. ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... abroad in Burgundy?' And as Sir Giles replied to each inquiry in turn, and told all he could of political matters, she exclaimed: 'Ah! that is better than the hearing whether the black hen hath laid an egg, or the skein of yellow silk matches. I am weary, O! I am weary. Moreover, young Hal, I know as matters are that could I see George Nevil face to face I could do somewhat with him, and I laid my plans to obtain a meeting, but ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... took out a skein of red wool and, motioning me to a seat opposite her, carefully untied the skein and laid it across my hands. All this she did in silence with a sort of droll deliberation and with the same bright sly smile on her slightly parted lips. She began to wind the wool on a bent ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... what word hath passed the door of thy lips? Man of mischief, sure thou shouldst lead some other inglorious army, not be king among us, to whom Zeus hath given it, from youth even unto age, to wind the skein of grievous wars, till every man of us perish. Art thou indeed so eager to leave the wide-wayed city of the Trojans, the city for which we endure with sorrow so many evils? Be silent, lest some other of the ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... falling rain sifting softly through the leafless trees, and answering to the faint sighing of the autumn wind. Morris enjoyed it very much, and but for the green glasses he still wore would have looked and appeared like his former self as he sat in his armchair, now holding the skein of yarn which Aunt Betsy wound, now talking with the deacon of the probable exchange of all the prisoners, a theme which quickened Helen's pulse and sent the blood to her pale cheeks, and again ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... with the hot young blood glowing through it like the faint red tinge we sometimes see on the inner side of a white rose leaf. Her hair was a very light brown, almost golden, and fluffy, soft, and fine as a skein of Arras silk. She was of medium height, with a figure that Venus might have envied. Her feet and hands were small, and apparently made for the sole purpose of driving mankind distracted. In fact, that seemed to be the paramount object in her creation, for she had the world of men ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... dismissed, and his new lawyers, a grasping, incompetent crew. For a moment, indeed, he had had a glimpse of a clear sky. A woman, who seemed to have the same kind of business faculty that many Frenchwomen possess, had laid hands on his skein of troubles, and might have unravelled them. But she had thrown him over. In a little while he would have to let Mannering—for who would buy an estate in such a pickle?—sell his collections, and go and live in a flat in West Kensington. Then he hoped his enemies—Chicksands ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... view, these three burgs, the City, the Town, and the University, each presented to the eye an inextricable skein of eccentrically tangled streets. Nevertheless, at first sight, one recognized the fact that these three fragments formed but one body. One immediately perceived three long parallel streets, unbroken, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo |
