"Spindle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Ennerdale. It was a July evening; and he sate Upon the long stone-seat beneath the eaves Of his old cottage,—as it chanced, that day, 20 Employed in winter's work. Upon the stone His wife sate near him, teasing matted wool, While, from the twin cards toothed with glittering wire, He fed the spindle of his youngest child, Who, in the open air, with due accord 25 Of busy hands and back-and-forward steps, Her large round wheel was turning. [3] Towards the field In which the Parish Chapel stood alone, Girt round with a bare ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... habits of organization are not so old. We have fought in company since we fought at all, as humans; but we have worked, for the most part alone. The comradeship of shop and factory is of yesterday, compared to the solitary spindle, loom and forge of earlier centuries. Yet in that comradeship wherever found, comes the new consciousness, that recognizes common danger or common gain, and substitutes the army for the mob, the ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... assented the noble. "Mme. de Beauseant is descended from the House of Burgundy, on the spindle side, 'tis true, but the name atones for everything. My wife is very much attached to the Vicomtesse, and the poor lady has lived alone for such a long ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... water, poised upon her head, and she was leading a horse by means of a bridle hung over her arm. Her hands, being thus not required either for the horse or for the vessel, were employed in spinning, as she walked along, by means of a distaff and spindle. ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... (Janiphi (or Jatropha,) Loeflingii, Kunth; Manihot Aipi, of Pohl).—This species has a spindle-shaped root brown externally, about six or seven ounces or more in weight, which contains amylaceous matter, without any bitterness, and is used as food, after being rasped and washed, so as to cleanse it from the fibrous matter, in the same ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... and he was only on his way to see after his own, or his wife's, since all the Whitburn sons are at an end, and the Tower gone to the spindle side. They say, too, that the damsel he wedded perforce was given to magic, and fled in form of a hare. But be that as it will, young Copeland—St. Bede, pardon me! What have ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which Nature gave, The highest right, supreme Humanity, Forfeit so wantonly, to swell your treasure? Whence o'er the heart his empire free? The elements of Life how conquers he? Is't not his heart's accord, urged outward far and dim, To wind the world in unison with him? When on the spindle, spun to endless distance, By Nature's listless hand the thread is twirled, And the discordant tones of all existence In sullen jangle are together hurled, Who, then, the changeless orders of creation ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... dainty feet, and a French hairdresser stood behind her chair putting the finishing touches to the imposing fabric of powder, flower, and feather upon her head. A little hand-mirror, framed in carved ivory inlaid with coral, and a fan, lay on a tiny spindle-legged table close in front of her, together with a buff-coloured cup of chocolate. At a somewhat larger table Mrs. Loveday, her woman, was dispensing the chocolate, whilst a little negro boy, in a fantastic Oriental costume, waited to carry ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she said, "if anybody does. Look, here's the place where I pricked my finger with the spindle." She showed a ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... metalliferous hills, and at this time, in consequence of the Dutch-Spanish war, and the multitude of Protestant refugees, it was getting filled with ingenious industries, and rising to be what it still is, the busiest quarter of Germany. A country lowing with kine; the hum of the flax-spindle heard in its cottages in those old days—"much of the linen called Hollands is made in Juelich, and only bleached, stamped, and sold by the Dutch," says Buesching. A country in our days which is shrouded at short intervals with the due canopy of coal-smoke, and loud ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... just like in the great wicked cities. It had already turned some of our very best homes into domestic hells, and no wonder! Decent, God-fearing men, who'd led regular lives and had whiskers and grown children, setting down to a little spindle-legged table with this creature, dipping their clumsy old hands into a pink saucedish of suds and then going brazenly back to their innocent families with their nails glittering like piano keys. Oh, that young dame was bound to be a ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... recognition by his old servant, the dawn-nymph Eurykleia; Sigurd is slain by a thorn, and Balder by a sharp sprig of mistletoe; and in the myth of the Sleeping Beauty, the earth-goddess sinks into her long winter sleep when pricked by the point of the spindle. In her cosmic palace, all is locked in icy repose, naught thriving save the ivy which defies the cold, until the kiss of the golden-haired ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... modifications in the arrangement of their fibres, as relates to their tendinous structure. Sometimes they are completely longitudinal, and terminate, at each extremity, in a tendon, the entire muscle being spindle-shaped. In other situations, they are disposed like the rays of a fan, converging to a tendinous point, and constituting a ra'di-ate muscle. Again they are pen'ni-form, converging, like the plumes ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... fellow—you needn't spring that kind of talk on me. I know you and your kind up one side and down the other. You say you've put three years in 'stir' and that settles it." At this point he broke off short, righted his chair with a snap and reached for a bill-spindle on his desk. After a glance at one of the impaled memoranda he sat back again, chewing his cigar and staring into vacancy. A full minute elapsed before he deigned to become once more aware of my presence. Then he whirled upon me to rap ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... got a skein more out of a pound than anybody else, and it was always so even—not a knot in it. And do you see that ring up there on the ceiling? It was beautiful to see her twisting the threads there. If I had been old enough to know then, I would not have let them sell mother's spindle—it would have been a fine legacy for me. But there was nobody to take any interest in us. Oh, mother dear! Oh, father dear! If you knew how we have been pushed about, it would ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... she performed Mihakko (a grand special service on the anniversary of death), which she was carefully preparing for some days. The rolls of the Kio (Buddhist Bible) used for this occasion were made most magnificently—the spindle of jade, the covering of rich satin, and its case of woven bamboo ornamented likewise, as well ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... prepared from the native plant by means of a very primitive spindle, which consists of a small rod of wood at the end of which is a top-shaped piece of the same material which serves to sustain the necessary rotation. A tuft of cotton is attached to the end of this bar, and, as the top rotates the thread is twisted. When the thread is sufficiently ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... to the purpose, for, even had an alias been beyond the invention of the knaves of that generation, it is known that servants were often called by their masters' names, as slaves are now. On what the heralds call the spindle side, some, at least, of the oldest Virginian families are descended from matrons who were exported and sold for so many hogsheads of tobacco the head. So notorious was this, that it became one of the jokes ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... superior to what I saw. This beautiful figure has repose, simplicity, nature, and grace, but I felt a want—the want of some internal sentiment: for instance, if, instead of watching the rotation of her spindle with such industrious attention, the Filatrice had looked careless, or absent, or pensive, or disconsolate, (like Faust's Margaret at her spinning-wheel,) she would have been more interesting—but not perhaps what the ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... there were still to be seen many examples of this quaint rustic furniture. Curious beds, consisting of shelves for parents and children, form a cupboard in the wall and are shut in during the day by a pair of lattice doors of Moorish design, with the wheel pattern and spindle perforations. These, with the armoire of similar design, and the "huche" or chest with relief carving, of a design part Moorish, part Byzantine, used as a step to mount to the bed and also as a table, are still the garniture of a ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... to play the part of the young enthusiast in "Excelsior," as I looked up at the weathercock which surmounts the spire. But the man who oils the weathercock-spindle has to get up to it in some way, and that way is by ladders which reach to within thirty feet of the top, where there is a small door, through which he emerges, to crawl up the remaining distance on the outside. ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... music,' she said. 'Look! See how it goes up to mother Mary. She twists it round her distaff and spins it with her spindle. See, marquis, see! Spout, ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... successive days, but on the second occasion Prince Ivan was a witness of what took place, and he seized her feather-dress and burnt it, and then laid hold of her. She first turned into a frog, then assumed various reptile forms, and finally became a spindle. This he broke in two, and flung one half in front and the other behind him, and the spell was broken along with it. So he regained his wife and went home with her. But as for the false wife, he took a ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... round-necked summer gown of pinkish tint, made at Mrs. Leverich's, which somehow made her pale little face and fair, curling hair look like a cameo. When she came down again, she ensconced herself in one corner of the small spindle sofa, to which Zaidee instantly gravitated, her red lips parted over her little white teeth in a smile of comfort as she cuddled within Dosia's half-bare round white arm, while Mr. Sutton, drawing his chair up very close, leaned ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... me too, Mr Deasy said. On the spindle side. But I am descended from sir John Blackwood who voted for the union. We are all Irish, all ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... death of Isabella's father, determined to seize the duchy for himself, instead of allowing it to descend to Isabella, the proper heir, who, being but a woman, was looked upon with very little respect. "Lorraine," he said, "was too noble and valuable a fief to descend in the family on the spindle side." ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... stiffest and last ascent up a winding, narrow goat-path, having sharp turns at the extremity of every zigzag, and with huge projecting stones, which seemed to bid defiance to the passage of the camels' bodies. Indeed, it was very marvellous, with their long spindle-shanks and great splay feet, and the awkward boxes on their backs striking constantly against every little projection in the hill, that they did not tumble headlong over the pathway; for many times, at the corners, they ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... heads aged by many a year-tide, And, as their wont aye was, their hands plied labour unceasing. 310 Each in her left upheld with soft fleece clothed a distaff, Then did the right that drew forth thread with upturn of fingers Gently fashion the yarn which deftly twisted by thumb-ball Speeded the spindle poised by thread-whorl perfect of polish; Thus as the work was wrought, the lengths were trimmed wi' the fore-teeth, 315 While to their thin, dry lips stuck wool-flecks severed by biting, Which at the ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... made for taking up the slack of this belt by mounting the spindle of the outer coned drum in bearings adjustable along a circular path struck from the axis of the lower feed roller as a center, thus insuring a uniform engagement between the teeth of the small pinion and those of the spur wheel with which the drum ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... about a silk thread; and nothing could better illustrate the deftness of the Hindu fingers than the motions of the workman whom we saw. Over a polished steel hook hung from the ceiling the end of a reel of slightly twisted silk thread was passed. This end was tied to a spindle with a long bamboo shank, which was weighted and nearly reached the floor. Giving the shank of the spindle a smart roll along his thigh, the workman set it going with great velocity: then applying to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... wax chucks is to get a perfect center. If you are not careful you are liable to leave a small projection in the center as shown at A, Fig. 21. The ordinary wax chuck cannot be unscrewed from the spindle and restored to its proper place again with anything like a certainty of its being exactly true, and if you insist on doing this there is no remedy left but finding a new center each time. It will be found ...
— A Treatise on Staff Making and Pivoting • Eugene E. Hall
... these were loosely attached to the shafts, so that when the animal was struck the shaft would drop out, leaving the head imbedded in its flesh. To the head was attached a cord which was wound up on a spindle passing ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... were reduced to the form of slender filaments, shreds, rods, splints, yarn, twine and sennit or braid. All textile work was done by hand; the only devices known were the bark peeler and beater, the shredder, the flint-knife, the spindle, the rope-twister, the bodkin, the warp- beam and the most primitive harness. The processes involved were gathering the raw material, shredding, splitting, gauging, wrapping, twining, spinning and braiding. Twining and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... thine, Wayland," he said, "has a fair neck to have been born in a smithy, and a pretty taper hand to have been used for twirling a spindle—faith, I'll believe in your relationship when the crow's egg is ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... at the mill, the whir and worry Of spindle and of loom, And the great wheel that toils amid the hurry And rushing ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... apparatus for the propagation of rotative oscillations is shown to the left of Fig. 3, and consists of a cylinder, A, mounted on a tubular spindle, and which is set into circular oscillations around its axis by the little vibrating membrane, C, which is attached to the axis of the cylinder by a little crank and connecting rod shown in detail in Fig. 4. This membrane is set into vibration by a rapidly pulsating column of air contained in a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... thin, spindle shaped, like those of very young girls, were encircled with a kind of metal ornament, and bracelets of glass beads; her hair was twisted into little cords; on her breast hung a green paste idol, identified by her whip of seven lashes as Isis, guide ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... King Alfred the Great bequeathed "his BOC-LAND to his nearest relative; and if any of them have children it is more agreeable to me that it go to those born on the male side." He adds, "My grandfather bequeathed his land on the spear side, not on the spindle side; therefore if I have given what he acquired to any on the female side, ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... frightened the big-nosed, spindle-legged suckling with your gruff voice, so that what should have been an easy stalk turned out a long chase ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser
... Blackberry," she said. "Hasten, Spindle, and Holly and Misletoe, for before the coldest hour that precedes the dawn has passed over the earth your little sisters must all be back in their ...
— The Dumpy Books for Children; - No. 7. A Flower Book • Eden Coybee
... contrivance is worth a few lines of description. Take a piece of wood, eighteen inches long, twice the thickness of a cedar pencil. Fasten with a strong thread a fine-pointed nail, or a sail-needle, to the end of this sort of spindle. Get a thick piece of wood, about the size of what is called in England a "hot cross bun," and in Scotland a "cookie," bore a hole in the centre of it, run the spindle through it, and wedge it fast about the middle of the spindle. At the top of the spindle fasten ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... waste of raw material has been reduced from 1/7 to about 1/10; inferior material, once useless, is now mixed with better stuff; and more important still, modern machinery has, by adapting itself to the spinning of finer yarn, effected great saving in the quantity consumed by each spindle. In many other industries we shall find this same process going on, whereby the proportion of capital which consists of raw material is reduced, and the proportion which consists in machinery and other ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... pale fruit entangled with pomegranates—green spheres and ruddy amid burnished leaves. By the roadside too were many berries of bright hues; the glowing red of haws and hips, the amber of the pyracanthus, the rose tints of the spindle-wood. These make autumn even lovelier than spring. And then there was a wood of chestnuts carpeted with pale pinkling, a place to dream of in the twilight. But the main motive of this landscape was the indescribable Carrara range, an island of pure form and shooting peaks, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... Sympson, who lived not far from the Lincolns at this period, left this description of "a mere spindle of a boy," in one of his earliest attempts to defend himself against odds, while waiting at the neighboring mill while a ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... of this temporary granulation tissue into scar tissue is effected by the fibroblasts, which become elongated and spindle-shaped, and produce in and around them a fine fibrillated material which gradually increases in quantity till it replaces the cell protoplasm. In this way white fibrous tissue is formed, the cells of which are arranged ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... From the sword of Kaukomieli, From the bow of Youkahainen, From the pastures of the Northland, From the meads of Kalevala. These my dear old father sang me When at work with knife and hatchet These my tender mother taught me When she twirled the flying spindle, When a child upon the matting By her feet I rolled and tumbled. Incantations were not wanting Over Sampo and o'er Louhi, Sampo growing old in singing, Louhi ceasing her enchantment. In the songs died wise Wipunen, At the games died Lemminkainen. ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... Japanese collection he chose a design representing a cluster of flowers emanating spindle-like, from a slender stalk. Taking it to a jeweler, he sketched a border to enclose this bouquet in an oval frame, and informed the amazed lapidary that every petal and every leaf was to be designed with jewels and mounted on ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... unraveling the cord of a man's existence, you will generally find the blackest hank in it twined by a woman's hand, but it is not less common to trace the golden thread to the same spindle. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... to incandescence is firmly held in place on a metal spindle, which is slowly revolved by means of an ingenious clock-work in the base of the fixture. The arrangement is such that by turning off the gas the clock-work is stopped, and by the turning on of the gas, it is again set in motion. The movement of the spindle is so slow that a casual ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... admirable series of illustrations projected upon a screen by the oxyhydrogen lantern, the life history of the organism to which he had referred, exhibiting it first as a translucent, elliptic, spindle-shaped body, with six long and delicate flagella, the various positions in which the five specimens were drawn giving a very good idea of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... into which she ushered Madelon was accounted the grandest sitting-room in the village. When Burr's father had built his fine new house he had made the furnishings correspond. He had eschewed the spindle-legged tables and fiddle-backed chairs of the former generations, and taken to solid masses of red mahogany, which were impressive to the village folk. The carpet was a tapestry of great crimson ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... nakedness, lay sprawling, as if to be crushed by the hoofs of the first passing horse. Occasionally, indeed, when such a consummation seemed inevitable, a watchful old grandam, with her close cap, distaff, and spindle, rushed like a sibyl in frenzy out of one of these miserable cells, dashed into the middle of the path, and snatching up her own charge from among the sunburnt loiterers, saluted him with a sound cuff, and transported him ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... two, along the regular path; then of a sudden, in an open part, the trail failed us. I turned back, a few yards, and looked close, with my eyes fixed on the spongy soil, as keen as a hound that sniffs his way after his quarry. 'He went off here, Elsie!' I said at last, pulling up short by a spindle bush ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... Frenchman had dinned into my ears met me practically. A sizar! another name for a dog! I had such strength, health, and spirits, that I had more life in my little finger than half the fellow-commoners—genteel, spindle-shanked striplings, who might have passed for a collection of my grandfather's walking-canes—bad in their whole bodies. And I often think," continued Gawtrey, "that health and spirits have a great deal to answer for! When we are young we so far resemble savages who ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... on, desperately, it seemed to me. 'Another picture, Smiles. Can you see a spindle-legged, mischievous boy of ten, who loved his little sister dearly; but teased her from morning until night. His ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... inches in length secured to its end. Through the centre log, in the back of the pen, and about two feet from the ground, an auger hole should be made. The bait stick with bait attached should be inserted through this hole from the inside, and the spindle caught on the outside between its projecting end and a nail driven in the adjoining upright. This principle is clearly illustrated on page 105 at (a), and, if desired, the method (b) may be used also. For a bear, the bait should consist ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... in spite of her boudoir experience. Her brain was prompted by her senses, her kindness was the impulsive warm-heartedness of girls of her class. But who could trouble over Coralie's psychology when his eyes were dazzled by those smooth, round arms of hers, the spindle-shaped fingers, the fair white shoulders, and breast celebrated in the Song of Songs, the flexible curving lines of throat, the graciously moulded outlines beneath the scarlet silk stockings? And this beauty, worthy of an Eastern poet, was brought into relief by the conventional ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... upstream was the Viewpoint Inn, to which summer folk from the city came; leaving cool, electric-fanned apartments that they might be driven about in burning sunshine, shrieking, in gasoline launches, by spindle-legged Modreds ...
— Options • O. Henry
... the gardener a basket of ripe fruit at the feet of Priapus; the implements of their craft are dedicated by the carpenter and the goldsmith; the young girl and the aged woman offer their even slighter gift, the spindle and distaff, the reel of wool, and the rush-woven basket.[28] A staff of wild-olive cut in the coppice is accepted by the lord of the myriad-boughed forest; the Muses are pleased with their bunch of roses wet with morning ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... spindle-shanked and used to bank on his physical weakness when lessons were to be evaded. He was two years at the Edinburgh Academy, where he reduced the cutting of lectures and recitations to a system, and substituted Dumas and Scott for more learned men who ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... the use of which they seem to have learned from the Peruvians, as they used the Peruvian term tica for that material. From the wool of the Chilihueques they manufactured cloth for their apparel, using the spindle and distaff for spinning this wool into yarn, and two different kinds of looms for weaving the yarn into cloth. One of these, called guregue, is not very unlike the ordinary loom of Europe; but the other is vertical or upright, and called uthalgue, from ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... of their friends, and the bride, taken with apparent force from the arms of her mother, as the Sabine women were taken in the days of Romulus, was conducted to her new home carrying a distaff and a spindle, emblems of the industry that was thought necessary in the household work that she was to perform or direct. Strong men lifted her over the threshold, lest her foot should trip upon it, and her husband saluted ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... a grand liturgy is recited, the "heaven-startling" Kami, having girdled herself with moss, crowned her head with a wreath of spindle-tree leaves and gathered a bouquet of bamboo grass, mounts upon a hollow wooden vessel and dances, stamping so that the wood resounds and reciting the ten numerals repeatedly. Then the "eight-hundred myriad" Kami ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... but peak and dwindle The clank of chain and crane, The whirr of crank and spindle Bewilder heart and brain; The ends of our endeavor Are wealth and fame, Yet in the still Forever We're one and ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... first Jerseys, and what a reproach their wizened bodies and piebald hides were in any herd. It was admitted that their milk was yellow and wonderfully rich in butter fat; but they were so homely, so spindle-legged, so brindled along the withers, so pale-yellow down the sides, so foolishly white in the flanks, down the fore legs and about the jowls, yet so black-kneed and wildly touched about the eyes, that ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... regular spindle-shanks. And just look at that fool Akoulina. Wasn't the girl a regular untidy slattern, and just look at her now! Where has it all come from? Yes, he has fitted her out. She's grown so smart, so puffed up, just like ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... yellow light flooded his face and again came up the hollow impatient cry, "Haul away, Sam. This lot's a good one, and it's mine." Replying "All right, Dick," Cleghorn bent to the crank. With much creaking the coils crept along the spindle and the light burden began ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... weekly salary, he never thought of enforcing it in the case of 'Gene. More than once some particularly fine story or flattering notice of the good cheer at Gaston's sufficed to restore Field's credit on George's spindle. At Christmas-time that credit was under a cloud of checks for two bits (25 cents), four bits, and a dollar or more each to the total of $135.50, when, touched by some simple piece that Field wrote in the Times, Gaston presented his bill ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... the aged, languid flies, with white dust on their backs, who were sitting motionless under the lintels of the doors, he ordered all the windows to be opened; no one had opened them since the death of Glafira Petrovna. Everything in the house remained as it had been: the small, spindle-legged couches in the drawing-room, covered with glossy grey material, worn through and flattened down, vividly recalled the days of Katherine II; in the drawing-room, also, stood the mistress's favourite chair, with a tall, straight ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... neatly kept, but poorly furnished, with that old-fashioned spindle-legged furniture which seems peculiar to lodging-houses. Yet the little sitting-room had an aspect of simple rustic prettiness, which is almost pleasanter to look at than fine furniture. There were pictures,—simple water-colour sketches,—and cheap engravings on the ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... both a shame and a sin; And the Dean, my master, is an honester man than you and all your kin: He has more goodness in his little finger than you have in your whole body: My master is a personable man, and not a spindle-shank hoddy doddy. And now, whereby I find you would fain make an excuse, Because my master, one day, in anger, call'd you a goose: Which, and I am sure I have been his servant four years since October, And he never call'd me worse than sweet-heart, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... way downstairs into the drawing-room in good time; she could look about her, and learn how to feel at home in her new quarters. The room was forty-feet long or so, fitted up with yellow satin at some distant period; high spindle-legged chairs and pembroke- tables abounded. The carpet was of the same date as the curtains, and was threadbare in many places; and in others was covered with drugget. Stands of plants, great jars of flowers, old Indian china and cabinets gave the room the pleasant ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... they might have done under circumstances less discouraging. Take, for instance, the common remark, that women have invented nothing. It is a valid answer, that the only implements habitually used by woman have been the needle, the spindle, and the basket; and tradition reports that she herself invented all three. In the same way it may be shown that the departments in which women have equalled men have been the departments in which they have had equal training, equal encouragement, ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... have been spoken of as the dynamic centre of the cell since they appear to control the forces which lead to cell division. In all the changes which follow these asters lead the way. The two asters, with their centrosomes, now move away from each other, always connected by the spindle fibres, and finally come to lie on opposite sides of the nucleus (Figs. 29, 30). When they reach this position they are still surrounded by the radiating fibres, and connected by the spindle fibres. ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... avoid comparing them with the fine gentlemen and dandies who promenade such unexceptionable figures in our frequented thoroughfares. Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden—what a sorry, set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear! Stuffed calves, padded breasts, and scientifically cut pantaloons would then avail them nothing, and the effect ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... two former small ones. A counter and railing stood inside the door. There was a telephone on the wall. In one corner he also observed a stack of surveyor's instruments; a big drawing-board straddled on spindle legs across one end of the room, a mechanical drawing of some kind, no doubt the plan of the mine, unrolled upon it; a chromo representing a couple of peasants in a ploughed field (Millet's "Angelus") was nailed ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... to enjoy with infinite zest the pastime of shooting-practice with little bows and arrows. No wonder that these Indians become expert bowmen. There were urchins there, scarce two feet high, with round bullets of bodies and short spindle-shanks, who could knock blackbirds off the trees at every shot, and cut the heads of the taller flowers with perfect certainty! There was much need, too, for the utmost proficiency they could attain, for the very existence ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... that the said Jan Koekebakken, prisoner, be conducted by the executioner from the Chancery to Brol-bridge, and that he be put into the pillory there. He shall remain standing there for two hours with a spindle under each arm, and with the letter in which he pledged faith to the said Aucke Sijbrant hanging from his neck. He shall remain for ever within the town of Leeuwarden, under penalty of death if he should ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... third, she is tall and slender, a fragile spindle, a slim, sylph-like creature, suggesting a taper with the lower portion patterned, embossed, brocaded in the wax itself; she stands magnificently arrayed in a stiff-pleated robe channelled lengthwise, like a stick of celery. The bodice is richly ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... devil! see him owre his trash, As feckless as a wither'd rash, His spindle shank a guid whip-lash, His nieve a nit; Thro' bloody flood or field to ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... thou call me that vile name, when thou knowest how it maddens me?" saith she, hurling her spindle upon the floor, and tightening both her pretty hands so that they looked like balls ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... sufficient horses were bred to supply the wants of the whole country. That seemed perfectly possible, considering how limited is the demand in this respect; but, on our homeward journey, we passed a drove of upwards of two hundred long- backed, spindle-legged colts, going up to Katmandu, and that did not seem exactly corroborative of ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... The moving blades, S, are cut on the periphery of brass rings, which are afterward threaded and feathered on to the steel shaft, and retained there by the end rings, which form nuts screwed on to the spindle. The whole of this spindle with its rings rotate together in bearings, shown in enlarged section, Fig. 3. Steam entering at the pipe, O, flows all round the spindle and passes along right and left, first through the guide blades, R, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... stripes; but abuse from him is not a punishable offense. Instruction, at home as well as at school, is confined to boys. The birth of a boy is indicated by hanging a bow and arrow over the door; that of a girl, by a spindle and yarn. In naming the number of his children, the father counts only the boys. Boys are clothed in the finest material the family can afford; girls, in rags. Parents may destroy their children, but ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... at the line brought a large closely-worked, spindle-shaped basket to the surface, when a commotion inside announced that the six-inch-wide square of flat cork, which formed a lid, ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... goes, And bravely shines his sword of steel; A heron's feather decks his brows, And a spur on either heel; His steed is blacker than the sloe, And fleeter than the falling star; Amid the surging ranks he'll go And shout for joy of war. Twinkle, twinkle, pretty spindle; let the white wool drift and dwindle. Oh! we weave a damask doublet for my love's coat of steel. Hark! the timid, turning treadle crooning soft, old-fashioned ditties To the low, slow murmur of ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... meant she should be courteous, facile, sweet, Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride: I meant each softest virtue there should meet, Fit in that softer bosom to reside. Only a learned and a manly soul I purposed her, that should, with even powers, The rock, the spindle, and the shears, control, Of Destiny, and spin her own free hours. Such when I meant to feign, and wished to see, My Muse bade, BEDFORD ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... beckets, and was half-way up the weather main rigging, while the watch was sheeting home and hoisting away the topgallant-sails and royals. When Keene reappeared on deck, after calling the skipper, I was comfortably astride the royal-yard, with my left arm round the spindle of the vane—the yard hoisting close up under the truck. With my right hand I manipulated the slide of the telescope and adjusted the focus of the instrument to suit ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... been led by two of her disguised ravishers, and on being thrust into the little cell, she found herself in the presence of an old sibyl, who kept murmuring to herself a Saxon rhyme, as if to beat time to the revolving dance which her spindle was performing upon the floor. The hag raised her head as Rebecca entered, and scowled at the fair Jewess with the malignant envy with which old age and ugliness, when united with evil conditions, are apt to ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... with Sanctitude. Past midnight this poor Maid hath spun, And yet the work is not half done, Which must supply from earning scant A feeble bed-rid parent's want. Her sleep-charged eyes exemption ask, And Holy hands take up the task: Unseen the rock and spindle ply, And do her earthly drudgery. Sleep, saintly poor one, sleep, sleep on; And, waking, find thy labours done. Perchance she knows it by her dreams; Her eye hath caught the golden gleams, Angelic presence ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... flame and glowing ashes and red-hot iron was on the ground. At a little distance lay a flat iron disc, called the "platform"; with a pole in the centre through which ran a spindle. On this metal plate lay a new cast wheel, and the wright with a bar screwed a nut so as to hold the cart-wheel down firmly ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... Hercules served Omphale)—Ver. 1026. He alludes to the story of Omphale, Queen of Lydia, and Hercules. Being violently in love with her, the hero laid aside his club and boar's skin, and in the habit of a woman plied the spindle and distaff with her maids. See a curious story of Omphale, Hercules, and Faunus, in the Fasti of Ovid, B. ii. l. 305. As to the reappearance of Thraso here, Colman has the following remarks: "Thraso, says Donatus, is brought back again in order to be admitted to some share in ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... the call of their duty, and go to that side of the kingdom which faces France, I know not why the ladies, who cannot live without them, should not follow them. The prejudices and pride of man have long presumed the sword and spindle made for different hands, and denied the other sex to partake the grandeur of military glory. This notion may be consistently enough received in France, where the salick law excludes females from the throne; but we, who allow them to be sovereigns, may surely suppose ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... weighing, with fuel and water for one hour, 154 lb. per horse-power, and was bold enough to employ it in proximity to a balloon inflated with coal gas. He was not able to stem a medium wind, but attained some deviation. He repeated the experiment in 1855 with a more elongated spindle, which proved unstable and dangerous. During the siege of Paris the French Government decided to build a navigable balloon, and entrusted the work to the chief naval constructor, Dupuy de Lome. He went into the subject very ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... brougham and motor came swaying up through the falling snow to deposit their jewelled cargoes of silks and laces under the vast awning picketed by policemen and lined with fur-swathed grooms and spindle-legged chauffeurs in ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving
... prize,[102] Since 'tis the first odd number that doth rise From the two foremost numbers' unity, That odd and even are; which are two and three; For one no number is; but thence doth flow The powerful race of number. Next, did go 340 A noble matron, that did spinning bear A huswife's rock and spindle, and did wear A wether's skin, with all the snowy fleece, To intimate that even the daintiest piece And noblest-born dame should industrious be: That which does good disgraceth no degree. And now to ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... found out; and as to a wheelbarrow, I fancied I could make all but the wheel; but that I had no notion of; neither did I know how to go about it; besides, I had no possible way to make the iron gudgeons for the spindle or axis of the wheel to run in; so I gave it over, and so, for carrying away the earth which I dug out of the cave, I made me a thing like a hod which the labourers carry mortar in when they serve the bricklayers. This was not ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... operating the valves, and causing them to open and close at the proper time, are shown in fig. 11. A bracket bolted up to the side of cylinder forms a bearing for one end of the side shaft, and also carries a spindle at its lower end on which the levers oscillate, transmitting the motion imparted to them by the cams to the valves. The main cylinder casting and the bed need no description. In some cases the bed is in two portions, though now a great ...
— Gas and Oil Engines, Simply Explained - An Elementary Instruction Book for Amateurs and Engine Attendants • Walter C. Runciman
... interesting to notice that in the early representations of Athena, while she is very warlike in her bearing and raises her lance in her right hand, she also carries in her left the distaff and the spindle and the lamp of knowledge. In the later art of Phidias she is still stern and severe, but her face also expresses dignity and grandeur of thought and character. Later still, her warlike attributes are made less ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... the trip. The room was about six feet by eight and contained a multitude of luxuries and necessities for the rubber-workers. There were .44 Winchester rifles in large numbers, the usual, indispensable Collins machete, and tobacco in six-feet-long, spindle-shaped rolls. There was also the "***" Hennessy cognac, selling at 40,000 reis ($14.00 gold) a bottle; and every variety of canned edible from California pears to Horlick's malted milk, from Armour's corned beef to Heinz's ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... absent-mindedly, dusting and folding her little cape, stopping when it was only half folded to stand forgetful a moment, her eyes far off, gazing back into the preceding act. Awaking with a little start, she went to her spinning-wheel, and, with her back to the audience, arranged the spindle and the flax. Then stopping in her work and standing in thought, she half hummed, half sang the song "Le Roi de Thule." Not till she had nearly finished did she sit down and spin, and then only for a moment, as though too restless and disturbed ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... tops, that will amuse the younger children, can be made from each spool, by whittling down from the rims to the middle of the spool till the parts break at the opening. A peg driven through answers for a spindle. These can be made in a few minutes, and may afford some fun for ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... schools And she cautions the boys, With a bustling command, And a diligent hand Employed she employs; Gives order to store, And the much makes the more; Locks the chest and the wardrobe, with lavender smelling, And the hum of the spindle goes quick through the dwelling; And she hoards in the presses, well polished and full, The snow of the linen, the shine of the wool; Blends the sweet with the good, and from care and endeavor Rests never! Blithe the master (where the while ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... walk abroad In leathern girdle, and a clasp of bone; And, with no artful coloring on her cheeks, His lady leave the glass. The sons I saw Of Verli and of Vecchio, well content With unrobed jerkin, and their good dames handling The spindle and the flax.... One waked to tend the cradle, hushing it With sounds that lulled the parents' infancy; Another, with her maidens, drawing off The tresses from the distaff, lectured them Old tales of Troy, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... anyhow. Whilst in our first dejection, I thought I saw a place where a flat roller would remedy the whole misfortune; but a flat roller at Cape Spartivento, hard, easily unshipped, running freely! There was a grooved pulley used for the paying-out machinery with a spindle wheel, which might suit me. I filled him up with tarry spunyarn, nailed sheet copper round him, bent some parts in the fire; and we are paying-in without more trouble now. You would think some one would praise me; no—no more praise than blame before; perhaps now ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rid of the power of gravitation; and by increasing the velocity he caused it to flatten out into a disc, and finally to project a multitude of minute drops, which continued their revolutions so long as the fluid in which they floated kept revolving by the motion of the rotating spindle, the divergent drops, the central mass, and the surrounding fluid, being all the while of the same density. But the essential conditions of the nebular theory are, that the central mass exert an attraction of gravitation upon all its parts, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the next cell, groaning in spirit, needs far more compassion. He was Mayor of Hamelsham, and great in the wool trade. He had at home a bustling, active wife, mighty at the spindle and loom. He had two sons, one of twelve, one of five; three daughters, one almost marriageable; he had six apprentices and twelve workmen carding wool; he had the town business to discharge; he sat upon the bench in the town hall and administered ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... placed upon a solid block of the same diameter, the contiguous surfaces of each being previously cut in notches or small grooves, and worked backwards and forwards horizontally by two handles or transverse arms; a spindle fixed in the centre of the lower cylinder serving as an axis to the upper or hollow one. Into this the grain is poured, and it is thus made to perform the office of the hopper at the same time with that of the upper, or movable stone, in our ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... would be better if he spoke no language at all; he wouldn't tell lies then. But of course, here he is, in the very nick of time," continued Marfa Timofeevna, looking down the street. "Here comes your agreeable man, striding along. How spindle-shanked he is, to be ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... it the right and left handed screws for adjusting the cut-off valves; and it slides freely upon a central spindle which has no longitudinal motion, but, projecting through the upper end of the valve chest, can be turned at pleasure by means of a bevel wheel and pinion. The rotation of the spindle is communicated to the sleeve by means of two steel keys fixed in the body of the latter and projecting inwardly ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... was promised a subscription of one thousand guineas to this fund, has a history so remarkable as to be worth relating across the Atlantic. Seven years ago he was a journeyman mechanic. Having invented and patented some kind of a crank or spindle used in the cotton manufacture, and needing capital to start himself in the business of making them, he made it a matter of earnest prayer that he might be directed to some one able and willing to assist him. In a singular and unexpected manner he fell ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various |
