|
|
|
More "Fiddle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the two Bird boys had now become would find little or no trouble about carrying out the work they had on hand. Every steel wire guy was kept as taut as a fiddle string; and by the time they were done handling the aeroplane it would be in apple-pie shape ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... the dance the shepherd dressed, In ribbons, wreath, and gayest vest Himself with care arraying: Around the linden lass and lad Already footed it like mad: Hurrah! hurrah! Hurrah—tarara-la! The fiddle-bow ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... "Fiddle-de-dee," said Miss Voscoe to her companions' shocked comments, "they were raised in the same village, or something. He used to give her peanuts when he was in short jackets, and she used to halve her candies with him. Friend of childhood's hour, that's all. And besides he's one ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... is an extremely poor, landlocked country, highly dependent on farming and livestock raising (sheep and goats). Economic considerations have played second fiddle to political and military upheavals during two decades of war, including the nearly 10-year Soviet military occupation (which ended 15 February 1989). During that conflict one-third of the population fled the country, with Pakistan and Iran sheltering a combined peak of ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... consideration, therefore, together with some others, were, for the most part, as a maul on the head of pride, and desire of vain glory; what, thought I, shall I be proud because I am a sounding brass? Is it so much to be a fiddle? Hath not the least creature that hath life, more of God in it than these? Besides, I knew it was love should never die, but these must cease and vanish; so I concluded, a little grace, a little love, a little of the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... still can harp, and carp, and fiddle. What further hath befallen or may befall The hero of this grand poetic riddle, I by and by may tell you, if at all: But now I choose to break off in the middle, Worn out with battering Ismail's stubborn wall, While Juan is sent off with the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... commented on the cat's behaviour to some friends who had also been to the Folies-Bergere on different nights. "But," said the first friend, "the evening I went, that cat did wonderful things; came down the ladder on her ball, played the fiddle, and stood on ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... alert on the receit of your strange-shaped present, while yet undisclosed from its fuse envelope. Some said,'tis a viol da Gamba, others pronounced it a fiddle. I myself hoped it a Liquer case pregnant with Eau de Vie and such odd Nectar. When midwifed into daylight, the gossips were at loss to pronounce upon its species. Most took it for a marrow spoon, an apple scoop, a banker's guinea ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... is given to the piece of wood that tightens the guy-line. The United States army tent has a fiddle 5-1/4 inches long, 1-3/4 wide, and 1 inch thick; the holes are 3-1/2 inches apart from centre to centre. If you make a fiddle shorter, or of thinner stock, it does not hold its grip so well. One hole should be just large enough to admit the rope, and ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... therefore, may appear light and trifling in our country of philosophers and politicians; but if they possess merit in the class of literature to which they belong, it is all to which I aspire in the work. I seek only to blow a flute accompaniment in the national concert, and leave others to play the fiddle ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... a tone of voice as different from the former as fiddle from violin, and with a particular eye to our hero, where he still kept his seat on his charger's back, or rather was kept there by the unlocked arms ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... planks supported on barrels at either end, he had poured strange mixtures into beer mugs and exchanged them for good government coin. When he was not performing his part as bartender, he was scraping illy timed tunes upon a fiddle. ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... let us dance and sing, While all Barbadoes bells shall ring, Mars scrapes the fiddle string While Venus plays the lute. Hymen gay, trips away, Jocund at the ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... see a light shining through a crevice in the rocks. Creeping cautiously forward and peering through the opening, he observed the formidable thief sitting on the floor, amusing himself with an old fiddle ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... Peter had said, reflecting, "that I should be doing it. That's why, I suppose. It makes me laugh. You might take to the fiddle if you wanted a good laugh. I take to my motor-bicycle. It's the only way to cheer oneself up when life is disappointing, to go and do something entirely ridiculous. I used to stand on my head when I'd been rowed or sat upon, or when there was a beastly wind; it cheered me ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... stand by and see another doing it? No! a thousand times no! That part, insignificant in itself, and yet often one of the very sweetest and most useful in life's harmonies, familiarly called "second fiddle," was a part impossible to ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... your people came of better stock than mine, If you hint of higher breeding by a word or by a sign, If you're proud because of fortune or the clever things you do — Then I'll play no second fiddle: I'm a ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... systematically directed towards making him callous, unthinking, and brutal. The slave-dealer collects his gang in Virginia or Kentucky, and drives them to some convenient, healthy place,—often a watering place,—to be fattened. Here they are fed full daily; and, because some incline to pine, a fiddle is kept commonly going among them, and they are made to dance daily; and he who refuses to be merry—in whose soul thoughts of wife, or child, or home, are too strong for him to be gay—is marked as sullen and dangerous, and subjected to all the evils ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... sail away home. ... Her lips quivered, and she blinked rapidly to suppress a threatening tear. She would rather shoot herself than cry before this patronising Englishman, but it was almost past endurance to play second fiddle all the afternoon, be snubbed on the way home, and look forward to an evening spent in ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... struck up between Frohman and Stoddart, who, in a way, was a character. He played the violin, and when business was bad and the company got in the dumps Stoddart added to their misfortunes by playing doleful tunes on his fiddle. But that fiddle had a virtue not to be despised, because it was Stoddart's bank. In its hollow box he secreted his modest savings, and in more than one emergency they were drawn on for company bed and board. When the organization reached Memphis Charles had so completely won the ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... that he was able to creep quietly up and catch him with his hands. The people all worked together in cultivating their respective lands; coming back to the fort before dusk for supper. They would then call on any man who owned a fiddle and spend the evening, with interludes of singing and story-telling, in dancing—an amusement they considered as only below hunting. On Sundays the stricter parents taught their children the catechism; but in spite of the presence of not a few devout Baptists and Presbyterians ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... before he became a conductor, was a world-famous performer on the double bass, that big growling brute of an instrument popularly known as the bull fiddle. In those days all that was visible of his impressive person was his head, one of his shoulders ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... Peace Seem'd to smile at the sound of the fiddle, Proud to fill up each tall shining space Round the lanthorn[1] that stood in the middle. And GEORGE'S head too; Heav'n screen him! May he finish in peace his long reign! And what did we when we had seen him? Why—went round and saw ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... were Neroes men, like Nero arm'd With Lutes and Harps and Pipes and Fiddle-cases, Souldyers to th'shadow traynd and not ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... Africa): the first being a fife (siscariello); the second a tin globe covered with skin pierced by a piece of cane (puti-puti); the third a wooden saw and a split stick, making a primitive bow and fiddle (scetavaiasse); the fourth an arrangement of three wooden mallets, that are rattled together like a gigantic pair of bones (tricca-ballache); and the fifth a Jew's harp (scaccia-pensieri). A tarantella danced to the accompaniment of so weird a medley of instruments ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... thou away from me the noise of thy songs." Disparaging comparisons were made with Nebuchadnezzar's idolatrous concert of cornet, flute, dulcimer, sackbut, and psaltery; and the ministers, from their overwhelming store of Biblical knowledge, hurled text after text at the "fiddle-players." ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... diminutive hero that the grotesque humour of the Reader would play upon the risible nerves of his hearers, as, according to Mr. Disraeli's phrase, Sir Robert Peel used to play upon the House of Commons, "like an old fiddle." Determined to Go Into Society in style, with his twelve thousand odd hundred, Mr. Chops, we are told, "sent for a young man he knowed, as had a very genteel appearance, and was a Bonnet at a gaming-booth. Most respectable ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... of no use to urge that life's bill of the play includes many hardly less brilliant and attractive performers. They are all well enough in their way, till the eternal Paganini is there with his old fiddle once more at his shoulder; then there is an end of all seriousness, or a beginning, as ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... 'em can whistle like a bird,—he can whistle like a whole band," answered Kinney, warming. "And of course the Kanucks can fiddle." ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... to live out av doors till I get rid av this cough," he answered. "And ye know I can do a stunt in the band. Don't take giants to fiddle and fife. Little runts can do that. Who do you reckon come ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... the stranger resumed their journey; and, by and by, they came to a house by the roadside, where some people were making merry. Young men and rosy-cheeked girls, with smiles on their faces, were dancing to the sound of a fiddle. ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... various points of the rock, both to occupy the attention of the savages, and to divert it from his pool, the bee-hunter next felt in his pocket and drew out a small piece of resin that he knew was there; the remains of a store with which he resined the bow of his fiddle; for our hero had a violin among his effects, and often used it in his solitary abodes in the openings. Breaking this resin on a coal, he made it flash and blaze; but the quantity was too small to produce ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... with a dance—and a dance too upon an unusually extensive scale. Indeed, during the whole day the fair competitors are regaled from time to time with the enlivening strains of the fiddle or bagpipes, and very often with the ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... a born artist and musician. Music, tone, sound, colour, vibrate in every page of your romances. Had your parents taught you harmony, the piano, and the fiddle, your music would have burst forth along its normal lines. As they merely taught you the alphabet and grammar, your creative faculty turned to literature; you wrote romances full of music, instead of composing music full of romance. It is a distinction ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... again, this brave honest lad, a change seemed to have come over the old man. The boy had been a willing dutiful soldier, everybody said so, and yet they were going to shut him up in prison for five long months, all because of a piece of fiddle-faddle! Devil take them all! What was the use of being a good soldier? And at a stroke every trace disappeared of the obedient and respectful old sergeant who had worn the uniform so proudly; he was peasant pure and simple, hard-headed and stiff-necked, a peasant who would stand up for ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... they were going to supper, an old man, with a fiddle in his hand, tottered into the garden, and down the lawn. He was a very queer-looking old man. He had long white hair, and a ...
— The Birthday Party - A Story for Little Folks • Oliver Optic
... Historical Register concludes with a dialogue between Quidam, in whom the audience recognised Sir Robert Walpole, and four patriots, to whom he gives a purse which has an instantaneous effect upon their opinions. All five then go off dancing to Quidam's fiddle; and it is explained that they have holes in their pockets through which the money will fall as they dance, enabling the donor to pick it all up again, "and so not lose one Half-penny ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... tents were cleared and lighted; two sheep were killed, and the cuscasoe was preparing, when the ladies arrived. The music consisted of an instrument similar to a flageolet, (tabla) a kettle-drum, and a sort of castanets of steel, an erbeb, or fiddle with two strings, played with a semicircular bow. The tunes 141 were gay and sprightly, and the damsels tripped along on the light fantastic toe in a very superior and elegant style. They danced without men; advancing gently at first, apparently without taking the foot off the ground, but gradually ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... of a take-down for the bleeder, ain't it, 'avin' to play second fiddle,' said Philpot with ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... with her to inspect this new treasure, I found a lad eight or ten years of age, very sickly, with a hump upon his back, and of a notably unprepossessing appearance, carrying a fiddle, and evidently forsaken by some strolling player. She had set her mind upon his staying, and he stayed; but finding the trouble her accumulated possessions were giving at Stair, she showed me within the week a bit of her ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... as fit as a fiddle. Let's hit it up, and get to the dock as soon as we can. Think of landing ...
— Frank and Andy Afloat - The Cave on the Island • Vance Barnum
... The violinist flipped the fiddle up under his chin. He drew the bow over the strings and began a gentle melody that reminded one of rain ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... stand ready to play second fiddle to her? No, no! a thousand times no! Was I not a New England lady? Did I not feel that the literature of the country had its eyes upon me? He couldn't help it; the deploring glance that he cast upon me was enough to satisfy me of that. Indeed, his feelings were ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... and no signs of weariness in his steps. The more he danced, the fresher he became. When he had danced half of the village tired, and they were all lying on the ground, drinking wine from earthen urns to refresh themselves, the last string of the fiddle snapped and the musician reeled from his chair. Only the flute ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... there were no moths in them, I spread blankets over them and put a sleepy, happy little girl to bed, for he had insisted on making molasses candy for her because they happened to be born on the same day of the month. And then he played the fiddle until almost one o'clock. He played all the simple, sweet, old-time pieces, in rather a squeaky, jerky way, I am afraid, but the music suited ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... in chiaroscuro among the arabesques of the cappella nova in the cathedral at Orvieto. It represents the youthful Orpheus crowned with the laureate wreath playing before Pluto and Proserpine upon a fiddle or crowd of antique pattern. At his feet lies Eurydice, while around are spirits ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... let loose upon them with that overflowing flood, their mirth was soon staid; and when the Lord in holy justice rained fire and brimstone from heaven upon that wicked people and city Sodom, enjoying fulness of bread and idleness, their fiddle-strings and hands went all in a flame; and the whole people in thirty miles of length, and ten of breadth, as historians say, were all made to fry in their skins and at the end, whoever are giving in marriages and dancing when all will go in a flame, they will quickly change ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... kindled on a wide level plot in the outskirts of the settlement, around which the trees spread their sheltering arms. On a plank raised on two casks sat the blacksmith with his fiddle. The carpenter sat beside him with a kettledrum, more literally a kettledrum even than the real thing, for that drum was a kettle! On a little mound that rose in the centre of the plot sat, in state, Dick and Mary, March and the vision in leather, their ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... resist the rollicking music back of the paying booth. Three sable musicians form the orchestra, and from a bass viol, fiddle and fife they extract melody that, with all its short-coming, would make a deacon wish to dance. Any one, white or black, can purchase the privilege of keeping step to the music for two cents, or one strawberry ticket. Business was ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... character; and its reputation was in nowise improved when, on the death of its owner, it passed into the custody of Mr. Milsom, who came down to Raynham one November morning, almost immediately after Lady Eversleigh's departure, saw the "Cat and Fiddle" public-house vacant, and went straight to the attorney who had the letting of it, to offer himself as a tenant, announcing himself to ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... external symbol of a never-failing enchantment. Through the pleasant harmonious give-and-take of the other instruments, the voice of his violin vibrated with the throbbing passion of a living thing. His dirty old hand might shake and quaver, but once the neck of the fiddle rested between thumb and forefinger, the seraph who made his odd abiding-place in old Reinhardt's soul sang out in swelling tones and spoke of heavenly things, and of the Paradise where we might live, if we were ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... like an artist. He presented his amphitryons with copies of his songs, he "obliged" at the pianoforte, he brought them orders for boxes at the Feydeau, his own theatre, he organized concerts, he was not above taking the fiddle himself sometimes in a relation's house, and getting up a little impromptu dance. In those days, all the handsome men in France were away at the wars exchanging sabre-cuts with the handsome men of the Coalition. Pons was said to be, not ugly, ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... in silk from head to foot; ain't it a relishin' sight to see her settin' there as fine as a fiddle, and hear folks calling little Amy 'Mis. Laurence!'" muttered old Hannah, who could not resist frequent "peeks" through the slide as she set the table in ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... goodnaturedly, but deigned even to take in good part the smile upon my countenance, as though he were a smile collector, and as though his estate were so humble that he could hold his laced bonnet (in all his bravery) for bear and fiddle. ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... those noble sciences. He becomes a compleat connoisseur in dressing hair, and in adorning his own person, under the hands and instructions of his barber and valet de chambre. If he learns to play upon the flute or the fiddle, he is altogether irresistible. But he piques himself upon being polished above the natives of any other country by his conversation with the fair sex. In the course of this communication, with which he is indulged from ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... nachrul sport," complained Ricks. "That's your trouble. When the last fight was on, you set on the fence and listened at a' ole idiot scrapin' a fiddle down in the valley." ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... the 'Magic Fiddle,'" said Nora, with a reminiscent chuckle. "I used to keep a copy of Grimms' Fairy Tales in my desk at school, just for that story. It always made me giggle. I could fairly see all those poor people dancing whether they wished to dance or not. Ask Hippy what his favorite fairy tale is," ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... is," laughed his friend. "But she's a right smart filly; she looks much the best of the lot. Dixon's got her as fit as a fiddle string. When you're done with that man you might turn him over to ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... without it, and wide about the plain; and the Dayling maidens went in bands trimly decked out throughout all the host and served the warriors with meat and drink, and sang the overword to their lays, and smote the harp, and drew the bow over the fiddle till it laughed and wailed and chuckled, and were blithe and merry with all, and great was the glee on the eve of battle. And if Thiodolf's heart were overcast, his face showed it not, but he passed from ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... at ease? My son, you are as strong as a Flemish work horse. I limped to mass for the next fortnight, and my gown was in fiddle-strings,—you may send me another. As for the rest, we need new altar hangings. Now, come, come, come. ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... said the King of the rath, "I thought it was no harm. He said he was tired of being by himself, and you know how handy he is with the fiddle or the pipes. If he'd been a fir darrig, that's always playing tricks and making trouble everywhere, why, then, of course—but he was only ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost
... maids flushed with joy, With glad hair blowing free. They smile right kind on many a boy, But only one on me. But I have a penny, a fiddle, and Joan, And my ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... me having overprimed his musket, with the consequence that when he fired, my face being so close, the powder flew up and caught my wound, which though only originally a slight one soon made me dance for a time without a fiddle. ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... labor. His hand was too nervous, his eye too uncertain, his breath too short for the constant risks of mountaineering; so he put away all further thought of adding store to store, and settled himself peaceably in his cottage under Castenand, content with the occasional pleasures afforded by his fiddle, an instrument upon which he had from his youth upward shown some skill. In this quiet life his ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... terrible Folker guarded the door with his fiddle bow, one side of which was a trenchant sword, the battle began. The Burgundians taunted the Huns with their weakness and cowardice until they ventured into the hall and were cut down by Hagan and his desperate men. When evening fell the thousand and four who had entered the hall all lay dead ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... dey be ready, de foreman strek out wit' hees steek, An' fiddle an' ev'ryt'ing else too, begin for play up de musique. It's fonny t'ing too dey was playin' don't lak it mese'f at all, I rader be lissen some jeeg, me, or w'at you ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... through the hearts of your young ladies, and sets you young gentlemen gazing on the evening star,—all that love too will become unfamiliar or ridiculous to an after age; and the young aspirings and the moonlight dreams and the vague fiddle-de-dees which ye now think so touching and so sublime will go, my dear boys, where Cowley's Mistress and Waller's Sacharissa have gone before,—go with the Sapphos and the Chloes, the elegant "charming fairs," and the chivalric "most ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... animals drawn up; they were most miserably thin—most of them swelled in the legs—few without sore backs—and not one eye, on an average, in every three; but still they were all high steppers, and carried a great tail. 'There's your affaire,' said the old Frenchman, as a long-legged fiddle-headed beast was led out; turning out his forelegs so as to endanger the man who walked ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... fiddle-stick; Now, tantan, tantantivi, quick; Now trembling, shivering, quivering, quaking, Set hoping hearts of ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... looked mutely in his face, making the slightest possible passes with an imaginary fiddle bow, and stopping, as he did so, sundry imaginary strings with the fingers of his other hand. 'Twas his constant consolation in conversational troubles. While these vexed him sorely, the passes would be short ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... and ran himself into debt because he bought so many and such good ones. Once, when visiting his father's house at Ipsden, he shocked the punctilious old gentleman by dancing on the dining-table to the accompaniment of a fiddle, which he scraped delightedly. Dancing, indeed, was another of his diversions, and, in spite of the fact that he was a fellow of Magdalen and a D.C.L. of Oxford, he was always ready to caper and to ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... Hrolfur. The fore-sail resembled a beautifully curved sheet of steel, stiff and unyielding. Both sails were snow-white, semi-transparent and supple in movement, like the ivory sails on the model ships in Rosenborg Palace. The mast seemed to bend slightly and the stays were as taut as fiddle-strings. The boat quivered like a leaf. The waves pounded hard against the thin strakes of the boat's side. I could feel them on my cheek, though their dampness never penetrated; but in between these hammer blows their little pats were wonderfully friendly. Every now and then I could ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... I tell you the plain truth. What are your pastimes? Cards and dice, fiddling and dancing, guzzling and guttling! Can you be saved by dice? No! Will the four knaves give you a passport to heaven? No! Can you fiddle yourself into a good birth among the sheep? No! You are goats, and goat like you may dance yourselves to damnation! You may guzzle wine here, but you shall want a drop of water to cool your tongue hereafter! You may guttle, while righteous Lazarus is lying ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... city,—those two atoms shaken into contact while the gods affected to be engaged with weightier matters,—the cultured widow of that derelict recalled the name of a gentleman in the East who was accustomed to buy tall clocks and fiddle-backed chairs, in her native New England, paying prices therefor to make one, in that conservative locality, rich beyond the dreams ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... think of nothing, and began to swear at the virtuous fits of that silly Republic, which, in his opinion, rendered all government impossible. To think of such foolish fiddle-faddle stopping a man of his acumen and strength! How on earth can one govern men if one is denied the use of money, that sovereign means of sway? And he laughed bitterly; for the idea of an idyllic country where all great enterprises would be carried out in an absolutely honest manner ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... right hand open towards a map of Dunkirk, which was pinned against the hangings,—I think, quoth Corporal Trim, with humble submission to your Honour's better judgment,—that these ravelins, bastions, curtins, and hornworks, make but a poor, contemptible, fiddle-faddle piece of work of it here upon paper, compared to what your Honour and I could make of it were we in the country by ourselves, and had but a rood, or a rood and a half of ground to do what we pleased with: ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... than disturbed the cover'; a hint that the wily ones immediately took, rushing up to the house, and availing themselves of the absence of the butler, who had followed the hounds, to take a couple of dozen of his best fiddle-handled forks while the footman was drawing them ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... of Science, or Books, And down go the everlasting looks, To his rural beauties so wedded! Try him, wherever you will, you find His mind in his legs, and his legs in his mind, All prongs and folly—in short a kind Of fork—that is Fiddle-headed. ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... whole day, and now the sun was low in the west, and long level rays of yellow light were spreading over the country, striking the windows of a farmhouse here and there into sudden flame, or resting more softly on tree-tops and hanging slopes. They were like fiddle-bows, Marie thought; and at the thought she held closer something that she carried in her arms, and murmured over it a little, as a mother coos over her baby. It seemed a long time since she had run away from the troupe: she would forget all about ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... better than in Berlin. One of the Bavarian Princes plays a fiddle in the orchestra in the Royal ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... kept so much of her freshness, her interest in life. Into this freshness of Madame Merle's she obtained a considerable insight; she seemed to see it as professional, as slightly mechanical, carried about in its case like the fiddle of the virtuoso, or blanketed and bridled like the "favourite" of the jockey. She liked her as much as ever, but there was a corner of the curtain that never was lifted; it was as if she had remained after all something of a public performer, condemned to emerge ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... and soon have things as fit as a fiddle," said Tom, throwing off some of his superfluous garments so as to be free ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... "he's dreadfully inclined to music since he had a drum, and I want the fiddle to see if I can't make another Pickaninny or an Old Bull of him. Jews-harps is simple, though I can't see how King David played on one of 'em, and sung his psalms at the same time; but the fiddle is best, because genius can show itself plainer on it without much noise. Some prefers ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... they seem to throw an almost straight track, neither splayed nor in-toed, and to set their feet down with a gentle forward pressure, rather like the Australian's stealthy footfall. Talking among themselves, or waiting for friends, they did not drum with their fingers, fiddle with their feet, or feel the hair on their faces. These things seem trivial enough, but when breeds are in the making everything is worth while. A man told me once—but I never tried the experiment—that each of our Four Races light and handle fire ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... the three bells that were the sign over the door of an inn where people were happily dancing to a fiddle, because there was a wedding. These ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... including the dogs and Maisie's pussies, the older folk moved to the front room. In a jiffy dishes and temporary tables disappeared in that big back kitchen, and the youngsters began their games. By-and-by a fiddle was heard, and I am afraid there was dancing. We had a happy evening. Two-handed cracks, stories, jokes, songs, made the time pass too quickly. It was a novelty to me that all the guests were either Irish or English; fine people, intelligent, wide-awake as to the necessity of advancing ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... "Wounded? A fiddle-stick's end!" said the doctor. "No more wounded than you or I. The man has had a stroke, as I warned him.—Now, Mrs. Hawkins, just you run up-stairs to your husband, and tell him, if possible, nothing about it. For my part, I must do my best to save this ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was no reason why the boys and girls shouldn't come together and kiss each other during a whole evening occasionally. Kissing was a sign of peace, and was not at all like taking hold of hands and skipping about to the scraping of a wicked fiddle. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... dance-hall. It was crowded, mostly with men. But here and there, like so many faces peering forth from living graves, he saw the Little Sisters of Tete Jaune Cache. Outnumbered ten to one, their voices rang out in shrill banter and delirious laughter above the rumble of men. At the far end, a fiddle, a piano, and a clarinet were squealing forth music. The place smelled strongly of whisky. It always smelled of that, for most of the men who sought amusement here got their whisky in spite of the law. There were rock-hogs from up the line, and rock-hogs from down the line, men of all ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... to justify the expense. Now she wished nervously that she had done as Lance Lorrigan had done, and brought musicians from Lava. Of course, there had been no piano when Lance gave his party, which was different. She herself meant to play, and Art Miller had brought his fiddle, and Jennie had volunteered to "chord" with him. But, Mary Hope felt much nervous apprehension lest these Pocatello and Lava people should think it was just ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... Fetid malbonodora. Fetter kateno. Feud malpacego. Feudal feuxdala. Feudality feuxdaleco. Fever febro. Feverish febra. Few kelkaj, malmultaj. Fiance fiancxo. Fiance fiancxino. Fiasco fiasko. Fibre fibro. Fickle sxangxebla. Fictitious fiktiva. Fiddle violono. Fiddler violonisto. Fidelity fideleco. Fidget movadigxi. Fie! fi! Field kampo. Fierce kruelega. Fiery fervorega. Fife fifro. Fig figo. Fight batali. Figure (represent) figuri. Figure (cipher) cifero. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... said, he would "give her hell." Mary was a member of the Methodist Church in Washington. There were several pious people in the company; and at night, when the driver found them melancholy and disposed to pray, he had a fiddle brought, and made them dance in their chains, whipping them till they complied. Mary at length became so weak that she really could travel on foot no further. Her feeble frame was exhausted, and sank beneath ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... weirdly from doors and windows and through canvas walls. Now about every other store appeared to be a saloon or gambling room, all crowded. There were other places of amusement, also, even to a sort of a theatre, where miners were dancing with one another, on the floor, to the sound of a fiddle and cracked accordion, while on a stage a thin woman with painted red cheeks was singing and prancing. An auctioneer was selling real estate, from a dry-goods box in the plaza. Stores were open, the streets were thronged, hammering and music and shouting were mingled just as ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... the housing of so many people for any length of time in the over-crowded mines was opt of the question. But that was a consideration to which the "Military Situation" could not resonably be expected to play second fiddle. ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... Glenn, a notorious swindler, who came prominently before the public in Chicago during 1905, was another "man-woman," of large and masculine type. She preferred to dress as a man and had many love escapades with women. "She can fiddle as well as anyone in the State," said a man who knew her, "can box like a pugilist, and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... not a word for my life—not breathe, even—to plase you! becaase I've a little business to mintion to the lady. Sixty guineas to resave from Mr. Gilbert, yonder. Long life to you, miss! But I'll say no more till this Scotchman has done with his fiddle and ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... in Tennyson and Browning, in Carlyle and Ruskin, came an age of passionate sincerity of protest against the dulness of prosperity. But now we seem to have settled down comfortably to sleep again, and are content to fiddle melodiously on delicate instruments. The trumpet and the ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... my face, and offered to do business with me at a fiddle.{6} "Tush, tush," said Peter Principal to the increasing multitude which now barred our passage, "we are only come to take a look, and watch the operation of the market." "Dividend hunters{7} I suppose," said a knowing ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... not serious," Saunders said. "I have seen him break down before. He is too intense, too strenuous; whatever he does he does with every nerve in his body drawn as taut as a fiddle- string." ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... cuff," continued the gipsy, "had me shut up here, and promised to hang me. Well, he may break me on the wheel, for aught I care, but I won't play for him even if he smashes my fiddle for refusing." ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... Mrs. Gaynor's songs, already mentioned, and the songs collected by Reinecke, called "Fifty Children's Songs," are excellent for this purpose. The old-fashioned nonsense songs, such as "Billy Boy," "Mary had a Little Lamb" and "Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle," may also have a pleasant and harmless ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... upon the tenth good shield A fiddle, and 'neath it a bow; That's borne by Folker Spillemand; For ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... planned how he would make up to his mother for having received her "legend" so freezingly. What kept him awake, after that, was a dim, rhythmic sound coming from the house next door, where a holiday dance was in progress—music far away and slender: fiddle, 'cello, horn, bassoon, drums, all rollicking away almost the night-long, seeping through the walls to his restless pillow. Finally, when belated drowsiness came, the throbbing tunes mingled with his half-dreams, and he heard the light shuffling of multitudinous feet over the dancing-floor, ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... ought to! Why, she was in the kitchen talkin' and fiddle-faddlin' with them eggs; she thinks I ain't up to 'em. There warn't nothin' on earth the matter with her then. She had sot the table in here and fixed up the fire, and then she come in to the kitchen and went to work at the supper. There ain't never ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... to want was a good husband. She was quite satisfied with her own lot in that respect, but she was anxious enough on behalf of Kate. And when a young man did come, who might make matters so pleasant for them, Harry quarreled with him because he was a free-selector. "A free fiddle-stick!" she had once said to Kate—not, however, communicating to her innocent sister the ambition which was already filling her own bosom. "Harry does take things up so—as though people weren't to live, some in one way and some in another! ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... first fiddle;—not in the concerts—but every where else, and the company would not spare me twenty minutes together. Sunday I dedicated to the drawing up my sketch of education, which I meant to publish, to try to get a school!" He speaks of "the thrice lovely valley of Ilam; ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... bent, to give their strides the greater force. After the men had all started, the captains of companies followed, even more fantastically dressed; and last of all came the great Colonel Congow, a perfect Robinson Crusoe, with his long white-haired goat-skins, a fiddle-shaped leather shield, tufted with white hair at all six extremities, bands of long hair tied below the knees, and a magnificent helmet, covered with rich beads of every colour, in excellent taste, surmounted with a plume of crimson feathers, from the centre of which rose ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... "I wish they would not say anything kind and pleasant and cheap. At college they praised my verses, and the theatres stole my music for the Pudding play, and the girls giggled over my sketches. And now, at twenty-six, I don't know whether I want to fiddle, or to write an epic, or to model, or to paint. I am a ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... deadly still for a long minute's interval, and then out of the nowhere ahead, with a suddenness which each time caused his weakened nerves to vibrate like fiddle strings, would burst the bellow ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the rainbow be the fiddle-stick to the fiddle of heaven, Let the spheres be the strings, and the stars the musical notes; Let the new-born breezes make the pauses and sharps, And let time be careful ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... was a stand in one corner, and a large extension table in the middle of the room, with chairs placed about it. In the corner across from the stand was a spiritualist medium's cabinet; and hanging on the walls were a guitar, a banjo and a fiddle. A bell stood in the middle of the table, and there were writing materials, slates, and other things scattered about, which theatrical people call "properties," I am told. I tore the black draperies ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... beauty of the night. The lovely southern sky was studded with stars; the breeze laden with perfumes that only a Texas prairie knows; and the air full of melody,—the deep laughter of the cowboys lounging about the bunk-house, and the sweet tone of Shady's fiddle as he played to the ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... with everything now, for beaching, capstan, chocks and all—the swell will wash them in. As the keel grates on the pebbles, the men jump into the water from the high stern and catch the drifting wood. Some plant the capstan, others pass the long hemp cable and reeve it through the fiddle block. A hand forward to slack out the cable as the heavy boat slowly creeps up out of the water. The men from other craft, already beached, lend a hand too and a score of stout fellows breast the long ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... cat and the fiddle, The cow jumped over the moon; The little dog laughed, To see such sport, And the dish ran away ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... learned what comfort is, I tell you! A bed on the floor, a bit of rosin, A fire to thaw our thumbs, (poor fellow! The paw he holds up there's been frozen,) Plenty of catgut for my fiddle, (This out-door business is bad for strings,) Then a few nice buckwheats hot from the griddle, And Roger and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... larger number of pressed men to the comparative freedom of the deck than was consistent with prudence. The number eventually swelled to fourteen—sturdy, determined fellows, the pick of the hold. One of them, having a fiddle, struck up a merry tune, the rest fell to dancing, the tender's crew who were off duty caught the infection and joined in, while the officers stood looking on, tolerantly amused and wholly unsuspicious ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... now, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. The authorities have sent them away. But we've Jews that play the cymbals and the fiddle in the village, so one might send for ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... speech)—noble lady to whom I have not yet referred. I will not hide from you the fact that she plays upon the fiddle with an elegance rarely to be heard. It is the earnest wish of (swelling his chest) my future wife and myself that she should take up ...
— First Plays • A. A. Milne
... afterward. Mr. Tidditt had stopped at the post-office on his way down and he had the Boston morning paper in his hand. Of course he was filled to the brim with war news. We discuss little else in Bayport now; even the new baby at the parsonage has to play second fiddle. ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... something or other which is to be had for nothing at all, or the next thing to it, if you can prevail upon yourself to go and fetch it. Perhaps Punch and Judy will pitch their little citadel in front of your dwelling; or, more likely still, a band of mock Ethiopians, with fiddle, castanets, and banjo, may tempt your liberality with a performance of Uncle Ned or Old Dan Tucker; or a corps of German musicians may trumpet you into a fit of martial ardour; or a wandering professor of the German flute soothe you into a state ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... Joe, suddenly recovering, went crashing into a Scotch reel with energy so great that time and tune were both sacrificed. As if by mutual impulse, Ruby and Dove began to dance! But this was merely a spurt of feeling, more than half-involuntary. In the middle of a bar Joe flung down the fiddle, and, springing up, seized Ruby round the neck and hugged him, an act which made him aware of the fact that ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... come and gane. And, indeed, my gudesire, of his ain accord, lang forswore baith the pipes and the brandy—it was not even till the year was out, and the fatal day past, that he would so much as take the fiddle or drink ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... Since your ladyship commands me, madam, I dare disobey no longer. My lodgings are in St Lucknor's Lane, at the Cat and Fiddle. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... money-amassing philosophy would meet any proposition for the fostering of art, in a genial and extended sense, with the commercial maxim,—Laissez faire. Paganini, indeed, will make a fortune, because he can actually sell the tones of his fiddle at so much a scrape; but Mozart himself might have languished in a garret for any thing that would have been done for ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... once again, burning to save the despairing sailors, the lifeboatmen dropped anchor and veered out their last remaining cable, well-knowing this was the last chance, as they had only the one remaining cable. Tight as a fiddle string was the good hawser, and the howling north-easter hummed its weird tune along its vibrating length, as coil after coil was paid out in the lulls, and the lifeboat came closer and closer, and at last slued right under the starboard ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... and fruit there! Nothing of the sort. Stones, painted stones! And those other things! Bottles they call them— bottles and decanters. All a deception. They're imps—some demigods! See how they dance. Let's join them! Come, old Zanzibar! Bring your fiddle! And my Bornean beauties, come you. We'll have a grand fandango. We'll make a dancing room of the Condor's deck, and kick up our heels high as the cuddy head. That's the way we'll do it. ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... do I look as bad as that?" laughed the other. "If I do, looks are deceitful, for I feel fit as a fiddle. I need only one thing to make a ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... estaminet, roofed it over with odds and ends of tin and tarpaulin, and the play was on. There was the orchestra against the back-cloth, rendering selections from popular Pekin revues on the drum, cymbal and one-stringed fiddle. There were the actors apparelled in the gorgeous costumes of old Cathay strutting mechanically through their parts, the female impersonators squeaking in shrill falsetto and putting in a lot of subtle fan-work. And there was the ubiquitous property-man drifting in and out among the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... be as fit as a fiddle," I assured her. "Border men are continually helping each other ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... choir, and under each of the sixty-eight seats are carved misereres, making a larger collection than any other in the country. The subjects range from a horrible representation of the devil with a second face in the middle of his body to humorous pictures of a cat playing a fiddle, and a scold on her way to the ducking-stool in a wheel-barrow, gripping with one hand the ear of the man who ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... fetch yer," said Dan, returning the gift with precision. "Ef you don't like my music, git out your fiddle. I ain't goin' to lie here all day an' listen to you an' Long Jack arguin' 'baout candles. Fiddle, Tom Platt; or I'll learn Harve here ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... out of it, you skinny monkey!" shouted Dreer. "All you're good for is to make rotten noises on that beastly fiddle of yours! Want ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... near geographically), and connecting itself with all the other types as far as Kadiak, in Alaska (Fig. 3). The outline of the implement is quite elaborate and symmetrical, resembling at the hook end a fiddle-head, and widening continuously by lateral and facial curves to the front, where it is thin and flat. A slight rounded notch for the thumb, and a longer chamfer for three fingers, form the handle. Marks 5 and 6 are wanting. ...
— Throwing-sticks in the National Museum • Otis T. Mason
... Sir, a Batchelour of some standing, and a Traveller; my Business, to consult my own Humour, which I gratify without controuling other People's; I have a Room and a whole Bed to myself; and I have a Dog, a Fiddle, and a Gun; they please me, and injure no Creature alive. My chief Meal is a Supper, which I always make at a Tavern. I am constant to an Hour, and not ill-humour'd; for which Reasons, tho' I invite no Body, I have no sooner supp'd, than I have a Crowd about me of that sort of good Company ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... face the realities of the world, had exhausted her. This was, of course, not said openly, at the town-cross of Exeter; but such was the opinion which Mr. Martin gave in confidence to the mother. "Fiddle-de-dee!" said Camilla, when she was told of feelings, susceptibilities, and hysterics. At the present moment she had a claim to the undivided interest of the family, and she believed that her sister's illness was feigned ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... and crouched down behind a tall pew. The only music that he had been accustomed to was the kind that Uncle Billy scraped from his fiddle and plunked on his banjo. It was the gay, rollicking kind, that put his feet to jigging and every muscle in his body quivering in time. This made him want to cry; yet it was so sweet and deep and tender as it went rolling softly down ...
— Ole Mammy's Torment • Annie Fellows Johnston
... old count and countess, and the young counts and all the little countesses her sisters. Counts! every one of these wretches says he is a count. Guiscard, that stabbed Mr. Harvy, said he was a count; and I believe he was a barber. All Frenchmen are barbers—Fiddle-dee! don't contradict me—or else dancing-masters, or else priests;" and so she ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... said further to Handsomelake, 'Tell your people, and particularly the keeper of the faith, to be strong-minded and adhere to the true faith. We fear the evil-minded will go among them with tempations. He may introduce the fiddle; he may bring cards and leave them among you; the use of these is a great sin. Let the people be on their guard and the keepers of the faith be watchful and vigilant that none of these evils may find their way among ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... day of his triumph came. At the end of the month the master read off the class-list, and, much to his disgust, George Dawkins found himself playing second fiddle ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... both countries, and every time I have left France it has been with more admiration of that lively land; {171} but Frenchmen, during this visit, looked at by us for the twentieth time, had evident signs of wounded vanity: they were conscious of playing second fiddle ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... farmer who played the fiddle well. The boy is said at the age of ten to have carved over the door a Latin ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... only go back to fiddle over the ruins. But who knows? At all events, I'll go back and carry with me all that your country had done for three generations of ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... the sort of man you are?" The priest tried to run away, but he could not go far, for the instrument he had tried to tune to the girl's fiddle was caught in the noose, at which he was much frightened, and did not know what had happened to him. His master pulled the cord more tightly, which would have given him great pain if his fear and alarm had not conquered all ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... terrace with a wild garden all round. It must have been very pretty before the war, even in its deserted state it is very nice; forget-me-nots and bits of lake and stream everywhere. I feel as fit as a fiddle and am ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... of some ideas of dancing is really ludicrous. The Cambro-Britains, in a very late period, used to be played out of church by a fiddle, and to form a dance in the church-yard at the end of the service. But the ideas which the Chinese have of dancing exceeds all others. When Commodore Anson was at Canton, the officers of the Centurion had a ball ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... about which last there was no hanging back. Yea, also, they have hired from Carcarrow Church-town, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of music; for Frank has put down the old choir band at Aberalva,—another of his mistakes,—and there is but one fiddle and a clarionet now left in all the town. So the said town waits all the day on tiptoe, ready to worship, till out of the soft brown haze the stately Waterwitch comes sliding in, like a white ghost, to fold her wings in ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... which may be said to be the Dutch part of the Italian genius. I have only to add a word of advice to the painters, that, however excellent they may be in painting naturally, they would not flatter themselves very much upon it, and to the connoisseurs, that when they see a cat or fiddle painted so finely, that, as the phrase is, "it looks as if you could take it up," they would not for that reason immediately compare the painter ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... boy; however, he was naturally resolute, and replied, "If I can do nothing else I can snuff candles, or deliver a message, or do anything that young lads do." "You can indeed?" "Yes, sir, and I can do more, I can play the fiddle and sing a good song." "A good song! I dare say—but d——d badly I'll answer for it." "Won't you give me a fair trial, sir?" "Fair trial indeed!" repeated the old man laughing, and walking on a step—"fair trial! a pretty trial truly—however," said he, turning round and beckoning to ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... know that you can't, if you've never tried?" Mr. Frog retorted. "If you can play Katy did, Katy did; she did, she did, by rubbing your wing covers together, there's no knowing what you could do with a real fiddle and bow." ...
— The Tale of Kiddie Katydid • Arthur Scott Bailey
... college refectory is a splendid baronial hall. In the Mitton village-church near by are the tombs of the Sherburne family, the most singular monument being that to Sir Richard and his lady, which the villagers point out as "old Fiddle o' God and his wife"—Fiddle o' God being his customary exclamation when angry, which tradition says was not seldom. The figures are kneeling—he in ruff and jerkin, she in black gown and hood, with tan-leather gloves extending up her arms. These figures, being highly colored, as was the fashion ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... and went to the railroad station; there the operator knew him. The lowest haunt in the town had a tent south of the Union Pacific tracks; and Cutler, getting his irons, and a man from the saloon, went there, and stepped in, covering the room with his pistol. The fiddle stopped, the shrieking women scattered, and Toussaint, who had a glass in his hand, let it fly at Cutler's head, for he was drunk. There ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... Chow tuned up hastily. Then he tucked the fiddle under his chin, stomped out the rhythm, and launched into a lively rendition of "Turkey in the Straw" while ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... next turned my head, or, more definitely—a violin. I bought a fiddle on my own account. Of course my father saw the instrument; if I could keep it out of his sight I could not very well keep it out of his hearing. Then, besides, little boys should not be deceptive. He says: "What are you going to do with that?" I says: "I'm going to learn to play it." Then he asked ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... bending in and out, contrariwise to the fiddle-head (scroll-head). Also, a round piece of wood fixed in the bow or stern of a whale-boat, about which the line is veered when the whale ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the consent of the parents on both sides, in order to avoid the expense of a regular wedding. The principal amusement on Sundays and holidays is the choro ([Greek: choros]), which is danced on the village green to the strains of the gaida or bagpipe, and the gusla, a rudimentary fiddle. The Bulgarians are religious in a simple way, but not fanatical, and the influence of the priesthood is limited. Many ancient superstitions linger among the peasantry, such as the belief in the vampire and the evil eye; witches and necromancers are numerous and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... to etiquette, I kept my position in the rear of my superior officers, I had fully determined in my own mind, being puffed up with previous success, to play second fiddle to no one, if I could help it, this time. Samuela was decidedly of the same opinion; indeed, I believe he would have been delighted to tackle a whole school single-handed, while my crew were all willing and eager for the fight. We ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... might be abstained from at other times, a harvest without whisky was like a dance without a fiddle. It was partaken of by all—each one, male and female, drinking from the bottle and passing it to his or her nearest neighbor. Drinking vessels were dispensed with ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... thee I call, Pro more, (as do poets all,) To string thy fiddle, wax thy bow, And scrape a ditty, jig, or so. Now don't wax wrathy, but excuse My calling you old Goody Muse; Because "Old Goody" is a name Applied to every college dame. Aloft in pendent dignity, Astride ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... could I find (Grant, Heaven, that once I may!) A Nymph fair, kind, poetical and gay Whose Love should blaze, unsullied and divine. Lighted at first by the bright Lamp of mine. Free as a Mistress, faithful as a wife. And one that lov'd a Fiddle as her Life, Free from all sordid Ends, from Interest free, For my own Sake affecting only me, What a blest Union should our Souls combine! I hers alone, and she be ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... one yell, for the pain about his chest—then made no further sound. The rawhide rope was like a fiddle-string. It seemed absurd that an anchor so small, so limber, in the sand, could hold so hard against the horse. Van urged a greater strain. He knew that the rope would hold. He did not know how much the man could ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... he beat her, uttering fearful curses. If he caught her praying, he said, he would "give her hell." Mary was a member of the Methodist Church in Washington. There were several pious people in the company; and at night, when the driver found them melancholy and disposed to pray, he had a fiddle brought, and made them dance in their chains, whipping them till they complied. Mary at length became so weak that she really could travel on foot no further. Her feeble frame was exhausted, and sank beneath accumulated sufferings. She ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... of rope, now taut, and resembling a huge "fiddle string," as Bandy-legs remarked, testing it as he passed along. It led them to the brow of an abrupt little descent, a sheer drop of perhaps twenty feet. Down this slope they followed the rope with their eyes and then discovered ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... quality. 'They don't teach you that direct appeal in Paris,' he thought. 'It's British. Come, I am going to sleep, I must wake up, I must aim higher—aim higher,' cried the little artist to himself. All through his tea and afterward, as he was giving his eldest boy a lesson on the fiddle, his mind dwelt no longer on his troubles, but he was rapt into the better land; and no sooner was he at liberty than he hastened with positive exhilaration to ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... some vibration going There in your heart, and that is you. And if the people find you can fiddle, Why, fiddle you must, for all your life. What do you see, a harvest of clover? Or a meadow to walk through to the river? The wind's in the corn; you rub your hands For beeves hereafter ready for market; Or else you hear the rustle of skirts Like the girls when ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... feels he can't laugh, and talk, and tell you stories about foreign countries, as this young fellow can, and having been so long accustomed to have you to himself, he naturally would not like the playing second fiddle to Richard Horton." ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... "Binnorie." The ballad here ends abruptly; doubtless the fiddler made fiddle-strings of the lady's hair, and a fiddle of her breast-bone, while the instrument probably revealed the cruelty of the sister. Other extant versions are composite or interpolated, so this fragment (Sharpe's) has been preferred in ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... on her violin and she came downstairs with her violin in her hands. Then a hush fell on the crowd, and the merrymakers listened, spellbound and dreamy-eyed, to the strains which the passionate-eyed little Hungarian girl drew from the fiddle resting so caressingly in ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... of war, and in thousands of other rooms, whose window-curtains were drawn to veil their light from hostile aircraft, the people who come to Paris as the great university of intellect and emotion, continued their studies and their way of life, with vibrations of fiddle-strings and scraping of ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... Can anything be less interesting? Here and there the portrait of a General! But such portraits! One veteran warrior is actually shown in the act of playing upon a fiddle! As for the pictures of the victories, there is scarcely anything new worth looking at. Same good old Inkermann, by Lady BUTLER, as of yore; and the same good old recollections of Egypt from past Academies. For the rest, the room ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... furnished, but with more moral principles, they would disdain to be led about like apes by such mimic marmosets. It is a most unworthy thing for men that have bones in them to spend their lives in making fiddle-cases for futilous women's fancies; which are the very pettitoes of infirmity, the giblets of perquisquilian toys.... It is no little labor to be continually putting up English women into outlandish casks; who if they ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... we had a dance, and here I became useful, being able to play Scotch reels and Irish jigs on the fiddle. Then we had songs and yarns again. Some could tell of furious fights with whales that made our blood boil; others could talk of the green fields at home, until we almost fancied we were boys again; and some could not tell stories at all. They had little to say, and that little they said ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... crabs burrow holes in the mud, and in them await your coming, and more often than not baffle your ingenuity to extricate them. Among other stalked-eyed crustaceans is that with one red, shielding claw, absurdly large, and which scuttles among the roots, making a defiant clicking noise—the fiddle or soldier crab (GELASIMUS VOCANS). Oysters seal themselves to the roots, and various sorts of shell-fish gather together—two or three varieties appear to browse upon the leaves and bark of the mangroves; some excavate galleries in the living trunks. The insidious cobra ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... his son again, this brave honest lad, a change seemed to have come over the old man. The boy had been a willing dutiful soldier, everybody said so, and yet they were going to shut him up in prison for five long months, all because of a piece of fiddle-faddle! Devil take them all! What was the use of being a good soldier? And at a stroke every trace disappeared of the obedient and respectful old sergeant who had worn the uniform so proudly; he was peasant pure and simple, hard-headed and stiff-necked, a peasant who would stand ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... Why, he told me to my face that I was a-getting old; old indeed! there's not a woman in London knows my age except Mrs Davis down in the Old Kent Road, and beyond a haricot vein in one of my legs I'm as young as ever I was. Old indeed! There's many a good tune played on an old fiddle. ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... seems to have been in fault: but he got into a pool in the middle of the wood, and there he lay drowned, with one foot up on the bank, when I went to see what the harking of the dog could be about. He clutched his fiddle in drowning; and I remember I tried to get the music out of it as it lay wet and broken on the bank, while father was saying the poor soul must have been under the water now two days. So I have reason to remember the ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... to the third queen and asked, "What are you quarrelling about?" The queen answered, "Why should I do nothing but fiddle about the nursery?" Vasishta thought for a while and said, "In a former life, O Queen, you were a maid of a jungle tribe. Every Monday you used to fast yourself and offer the choicest fruits that you picked to the god Shiva. In return for them he has made you ...
— Deccan Nursery Tales - or, Fairy Tales from the South • Charles Augustus Kincaid
... quantities of beef and pork were served and the care-free hours given over to dancing and general merry-making. "Uncle Dock" recalls that his master, Dan Wilborn, who was a good-natured man of large stature, derived much pleasure in playing his "fiddle" and that often in the early summer evenings he would walk down to the slave quarters with his violin remarking that he would supply the music and that he wished to see his "niggers" dance, and dance they ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... that shines so bright, Till she is tired, let Betty Foy With girt and stirrup fiddle-faddle; But wherefore set upon a saddle Him whom she loves, ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... she used to let us choose our favourite songs, each in turn. Blanche plays the violin now, very well, they say, and mamma declares she is really far cleverer at music than she herself ever was; but for all that, I shall never care for her fiddle anything like mamma's singing; if I live to be a hundred, I shall never ...
— Peterkin • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... that I did, a little, and that in a very amateurish way I also played the fiddle. I may as well frankly confess that in my inmost heart I rather prided myself upon my musical accomplishments, music being a perfect passion with me. I had often been complimented upon the quality of my baritone voice and ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... opinion in this matter"—"Thou art welcome, Trim," quoth my Uncle Toby. "Why then," replied Trim, pointing with his right hand towards a map of Dunkirk: "I think with humble submission to your honour's better judgement, that the ravelins, bastions, and curtains, make but a poor, contemptible, fiddle-faddle piece of work of it here upon paper, compared to what your honour and I could make of it were we out in the country by ourselves, and had but a rood and a half of ground to do what we pleased with. As summer is coming on," continued Trim, "your honour might sit out of doors ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... is a most pig-headed sot! (aloud) Young man, you cannot know the risk you run. Th' alternative's in earnest—not in fun. Dame Turandot will spin you a tough riddle, That's not to be "got thro' like any fiddle." Not such as this, which any child might guess— (Though the Emperor could not, I must confess;) "What gives a cold, cures a cold, and pays the doctor's bill?" Not short enigmas lightly disentangled; Hard nuts you'll have to crack, fresh made, new-fangled; And ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... The cat and the fiddle, The cow jumped over the moon; The little dog laughed To see such craft, And the dish ran away ...
— Traditional Nursery Songs of England - With Pictures by Eminent Modern Artists • Various
... regular pull; but I was a bit too late. Why don't you attend to your fishing instead of fiddle-faddling with that revolver? Pull ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... more meals in the Casa Veronese, but took Marianina for one or two pleasant walks, and told her stories and sang to her in the grenier, while she improvised for him clever little obbligatos on her fiddle. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... CHARLIE, not by a jugful, but anger's all fiddle-de-dee; They may copy my style till all's blue, but they won't discombobulate me. Names and metres is anyone's props; but of one thing they don't get the 'ang; They ain't fly to good patter, old pal, they ain't copped the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... teeth, and a golden beard. His appearance was grave, but not morose, as if he were always examining things and people without condemning them. It was evident that he expected to take the upper hand in general, to play the first fiddle, to hold the top saw, to "be helped to all the stuffing of the pumpkin," as dear Uncle Sam was fond of saying. Of moderate stature, almost of middle age, and dressed nicely, without any gewgaws, which look so common upon a gentleman's front, ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... back to me in this way. The first time I ever thought of writing his love story as an old man's gift to a little maid since grown tall, was one night while I sat alone in the school-house; on my knees a fiddle that has been my only living companion since I sold my hens. My mind had drifted back to the first time I saw Gavin and the Egyptian together, and what set it wandering to that midnight meeting was my garden gate shaking in the wind. At ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... been turned into hospital about a week, an' I was on deck doing some odd job or the other, when the cook comes up to me pulling a face as long as a fiddle. ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... then facetiously observes, "How should we marvel to see the Duke of Wellington, like another Epaminondas, take his flute out of his pocket to still the clamour of the opposition, or Mr. Peel reply to the arguments of Mr. Huskisson with an allegro on the fiddle." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... the master's favorite—not because he was particularly studious, but because he took to the fiddle as naturally, Dermot said, "as a ducklin' takes to the wather, just." Indeed, the boy showed such extraordinary talent for music, that, for the mere love of it, Dermot gave him lessons, and often lent him an old ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... the Heart of a Man is deprest with Cares, The Mist is dispell'd when a Woman appears; Like the Notes of a Fiddle, she sweetly, sweetly Raises the Spirits, and charms our Ears, Roses and Lilies her Cheeks disclose, But her ripe Lips are more sweet than those. Press her, Caress her, With Blisses, Her Kisses Dissolve us ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... it is felt that everything depends upon causation; how to play the fiddle, or sail a yacht, or get one's living, or defeat the enemy. The price of pig-iron six months hence, the prospects of the harvest, the issue in a Coroner's Court, Home Rule and Socialism, are all questions ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... mind now, and finds it hard to keep up with others and at the same time out of debt, she has the right to hope that by and by she will be so good an actress, and so valuable to the theatre, that a fat salary will make the clothes matter play second fiddle, as is right and proper it should, to the ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... de pooh man dance One night in de yeah; Pooh man foh de rich man prance All times, do yuh heah? Pooh man play de violin While de rich man swing; Pooh man squeeze de fiddle in When he wants toh sing! Mistah rich man, hab yoh fun Makin' grub foh us; Min' dat stohy ez yuh run 'Bout ole Lazaruss! Guess yuh'll dance some ober dah, Jes' ez like ez not; Swing dem pahtnehs fas' en fah 'Foh ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... dogs and Maisie's pussies, the older folk moved to the front room. In a jiffy dishes and temporary tables disappeared in that big back kitchen, and the youngsters began their games. By-and-by a fiddle was heard, and I am afraid there was dancing. We had a happy evening. Two-handed cracks, stories, jokes, songs, made the time pass too quickly. It was a novelty to me that all the guests were either Irish or English; fine people, intelligent, wide-awake as to the necessity of advancing and ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... not wish to speak about that now. I take this figure of a man who so contentedly and continually took such a subordinate place—played second fiddle quite willingly all his days, and who toiled on without any notice or record, and ask whether it does not teach one ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... get a new string for my fiddle, And call to the neighbours to come, And partners shall dance down the middle Until the old pewter-wares hum: And we'll sip the mead, ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... which sells merely everything (except patent-medicines)—on condition that you order it by post. Go into that house with money in your palm, and ask for a fan or a flail or a fur-coat or a fountain-pen or a fiddle, and you will be requested to return home and write a letter about the proposed purchase, and stamp the letter and drop it into a mail-box, and then to wait till the article arrives at your door. That house is one of the most spectacular and pleasing proofs that the inhabitants of ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... pickaninny found a swamp blackbird's nest, and showed her how strangely it was made; then they climbed down the chimney of the school-house, and he showed her how the chimney swallow glued her nest together; and he coaxed a katydid to fiddle with his wings, that she might see that. At last they entered ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... my boy. I hope you do, but you've a deal to learn yet. Gardening's like learning to play the fiddle; there's always something more to get hold of than you know. I wish I had some ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... I; my heart is a fiddle; the strings are rozend with ioy that my other young Mr. is come home, & my tongue the sticke that ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... children of the village sang and laughed, and ate the big round cakes of Dijon and the almond gingerbread of Brabant, and danced in the great barn to the light of the stars and the music of flute and fiddle. ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... well knowing it was an all-night affair. The talk and laughter of the riders was in the saloons; they leaned joking over the bars, they sat behind their cards at the tables, they strolled to the post-trader's to buy presents for their easy sweethearts their boots were keeping audible time with the fiddle at Mrs. Slaghammer's. From the multitude and vigor of the sounds there, the dance was being done regularly. "Regularly" meant that upon the conclusion of each set the gentleman led his lady to the bar and invited her to choose and it was also regular that the lady should ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... Bah! I should have thought that you knew him better than that, Manutoli. To him a woman is a voice, and nothing else. If the same sounds could be got out of a flute or a fiddle he would like it much better, and think it far more convenient. I don't think my uncle Lamberto ever knew whether a woman was pretty or plain. I wish to heaven he would get caught for once in his life; it would suit my book very well. He would have less ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... wastes and the woodland beauty and the happy fields we till, And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead, And the wise men seeking out marvels and the poet's teaming head. And the painter's hand of wonder, and the marvellous fiddle-bow, And the banded choirs of music—all those that do and know. For all these shall be ours and all men's, nor shall any lack a share Of the toil and the gain of living in the days when ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... most grateful touch of the hat; and Guy hastened to set things in order, preferring the carols to everything at that moment, even though disabused of his pristine admiration for James Robinson's fiddle, and for Harry Ray's grand shake. A long space was spent in listening, and a still longer in the endeavour to show what Mr. Ashford meant by suggesting some improvements which they were regarding with dislike and suspicion, till they found Sir Guy was of the same ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the 'Royal Edinburgh,' and enjoyed once more the restful calm of a quasi-tropical night, broken only by the Christmas twanging of the machete (which is to the guitar what kit is to fiddle); by the clicking of the pebbles on the shore, and by the gentle murmuring of the ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... round under the low ceiling in the valse, young and old, rich and poor, high and low, the sound of their laughter and the scraping of their feet cut now and again by an agonized squeak from Zeron's fiddle. From time to time a staggering, panting couple would fling themselves out, help themselves liberally to pink sirop from the bowl on the side table, and then fling themselves in once more, until Zeron stopped from sheer exhaustion, to tune up for a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... his fiddle under his arm and his bow hanging loosely from his left hand, was duly presented. Mademoiselle's eyes beamed graciously as she held out her hand and said what pleasure it gave her to make the acquaintance of one who loved ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... Hubutt—Dudeldum—fiddles squeaking and bag-pipes droning as if they never would stop. The crazy throng shouted amidst the din; the noise still rings in my ears. There was no end to the games and dancing. The lads tossed their brown, blue and red-stockinged legs in the air, just as the fiddle played—the coat-tails flew and, holding a girl clasped in the right arm and a mug of beer high over their heads till the foam spattered, the throng of men whirled round and round. There was as much screaming and rejoicing ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... my dreaming. From the mufflers in which his father, the mountebank, has wrapped the child, to carry him across the heath, a little tumbling-boy emerges in soiled tights. He is half asleep. His father scrapes the fiddle. The boy shortens his red belt, kisses his fingers to us, and ties himself into a knot among the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... drawn up; they were most miserably thin—most of them swelled in the legs—few without sore backs—and not one eye, on an average, in every three; but still they were all high steppers, and carried a great tail. 'There's your affaire,' said the old Frenchman, as a long-legged fiddle-headed beast was led out; turning out his forelegs so as to endanger the man who ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... for he was not of many words, even to his wife. His language was his music,—as hers, her cares! He was more communicative to his barbiton, as the learned Mersennus teaches us to call all the varieties of the great viol family. Certainly barbiton sounds better than fiddle; and barbiton let it be. He would talk to THAT by the hour together,—praise it, scold it, coax it, nay (for such is man, even the most guileless), he had been known to swear at it; but for that excess he was always penitentially remorseful. ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... She treated the suitors for the pleasure of the next set with becoming ease and suavity of manner; she knew her worth, and managed accordingly. When the favoured gallant stood by her side waiting for the rudely scraped tune from a screeching fiddle, satisfaction, joy, and triumph over his rivals were pictured on his ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... resound in the mountains, and monumental stones are erected over warriors, who "buckled on their belts," and fell in single combat. From Hallingdal went forth the national Polska (the Halling), and only the Hardanger-fela (the Hallingdal fiddle) can rightly give its wild, extraordinary melody. Most beautiful are the flowers of remembrance which the Christian antiquity exhibits, and the eternal snow upon the crowns of the ancient mountains is not more imperishable than these ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... had forfeited that love for vengeance, he could not tell. The embers of a man's passions will suddenly burst into flame, and he will fiddle madly while the fire burns his soul. He had avenged her as well as himself; but had he avenged her, now that he held Isaac Worthington in his power? By crushing him, had he not added to her trouble and her sorrow? ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... have two sweethearts, then—one from the city and one from the country, a married woman and this poor girl," said he, in a jeering tone; "does little Reine know that she is playing second fiddle?" ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... almost at the last moment, that one of her guests is unavoidably detained and will not be able to attend the dinner, she may call upon a friend to take the vacant place. The friend thus invited should not feel that he or she is playing "second-fiddle" and the fact that she was not invited at first should not tempt her to refuse the invitation which would be a serious discourtesy, indeed. Quite on the contrary, she should accept cordially, and then do her utmost to make her (or his, as the ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... determines the design of a boat, or of a waggon, or of a plough-share, so it controls absolutely the fashioning of tools, and is responsible for any beauty of form they may possess. Of all tools none, of course, is more exquisite than a fiddle-bow. But the fiddle-bow never could have been perfected, because there would have been no call for its tapering delicacy, its calculated balance of lightness and strength, had not the violinist's technique reached ...
— Progress and History • Various
... over sixteen hands—a clumsy, big-footed, mean-looking, clean-limbed lady, rough-coated, and scored all over with marks of "savaging." She was fiddle-headed and as lean as a hay-rake, but in build she was every inch a grand piece of horse-flesh. And Tresler was sufficient horseman to appreciate her lines, as well as the vicious, roving eye which displayed the flashing ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... innocent freedom; no disgusting pruderies, no coquettish airs tarnished this enlivening assembly: they behaved according to their native dispositions, the only rules of decorum with which they were acquainted. What would an European visitor have done here without a fiddle, without a dance, without cards? He would have called it an insipid assembly, and ranked this among the dullest days he bad ever spent. This rural excursion had a very great affinity to those practised in our province, with this difference only, that we have no objection to the sportive ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... gazed about him with proud and sparkling eyes, whilst his pleasure, his joy, was greatly enhanced to find that all the seats near and behind Marianna were occupied by women alone. A couple of violins and a bass-fiddle were being tuned behind the curtains of the stage; the old gentleman's heart beat with expectation; and when all at once the orchestra struck up the ritornello of his work, he felt an electric thrill ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Old VILL-I-AM, at fust vos pal most chummy, But second fiddle vos not quite the instrument for Brummy. Says he, "Old VILL vants his own vay, the vicked old vote-snatcher! But that arrangement vill not suit ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... McClure rose from his seat, and said, "I'll pit awa the fiddle, and bid ye a good nicht. I think I'll be going hame to ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... of old they were civilised: by witchery of the Orphic fiddle-bow, and Euterpean rhythm; by the Graces, by the Smiles! Thermidorian Deputies are there in those soirees; Editor Freron, Orateur du Peuple; Barras, who has known other dances than the Carmagnole. Grim Generals of the Republic are there; in enormous horse-collar neckcloth, good against ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... seduced my affianced bride, and then left her whole soul, once fair and blooming—I swear it—with its leaves fresh from the dews of heaven, one rank leprosy, this man who, rolling in riches, learned to cheat and pilfer as a boy learns to dance and play the fiddle, and (to damn me, whose happiness he had blasted) accused me to the world of his own crime!—here is this man who has not left off one vice, but added to those of his youth the bloodless craft of the veteran knave;—here is this ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Melvin, with a smile, "that's only the name the fellows gave to Sid Wilton. He plays second fiddle to Shanks. He's always at his beck and call, and ready to fetch and carry for him. He jumps through the hoop and rolls over and plays dead whenever Andy gives ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... and the fat clarinetist and, of course, the leader—he whose match could not be found in the kingdom. He stands on the very edge of the rough platform, his fiddle under his chin, and he stoops well forward, so that his hands and instrument almost touch the ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... tub stand on its own bottom! Either I do the job or I don't do it; but I don't take the part of an apprentice. I'll agree to play second fiddle to you, with you playing first. But I'll be—condemned—if I'll play first, with a coach at my elbow. Take that and ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... leaves, heaped beneath a cottonwood, and from the rustling his ears, warmed by the old liquor, caught the first bars of a tune he had known in his youth; and lifting high his voice he sang it over and over again. He passed a negro cabin whence often had proceeded at night the penetrating cry of a fiddle, and it was night now but no fiddle sent forth its whine. A dog shoved open the door, and by the fire light within the old man saw a negro sitting with a gun across his lap, and beside him stood two boys, looking with rapture upon their ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... by the gout, his principal occupation was his violin, and it was her delight to listen to him. She more than once observed to the vicar, "Such music is quite heavenly." "I am in despair," cried out the village fiddler, "I may now stick my fiddle in my thatched roof, for a greater performer is come to reside in the parish." The existing superstition of the country is that his spirit, playing on his favourite instrument, still haunts one wing of Brynbella. If he designed the building, ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... a small chamber set apart for music practice, the only furniture it contained being a piano, a chair, some fiddle-cases, and music-stands, while on the mantelpiece, in the place of a clock, was a metronome that had something wrong with the works. Jack, however, had no eye for these details; his attention was centred in a group of ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... of October, 1862, saw a stir about head-quarters which indicated that something out of the ordinary was afoot. During the evening of the 8th the officers were engaged in a lively social intercourse with the ladies of "The Bower," the entertainment ending in a serenade in which the banjo and fiddle took chief part. Warlike affairs seemed absent from the thoughts of all, with the exception that the general devoted more time ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... in the tremendous noise and uproar that resounded from within. It seemed as if a number of people were fighting pretty much as a banditti in a melodrama do, with considerable more of confusion than requisite; a fiddle and a French horn also lent their assistance to shouts and cries which, to say the best, were not exactly the aids to study I ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... green colour and golden sound. We have the best blackbird here that we have had for years; we have two; but the other is but an average performer. Anything so rich and clear as the pipe of our first fiddle, it never entered into the heart of man to fancy. How the years slip away, Colvin; and we walk little cycles, and turn in little abortive spirals, and come out again, hot and weary, to find the same view before us, the same hill barring the road. Only, bless ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mountainous scenes in which the opera plays. The use of an Oriental interval, beloved of Poles and Gipsies, characterizes the melos of the first act; the rhythm of a peasant dance inspires the ballet, which is not an idle divertissement, but an integral element of the play, and Gipsy fiddle and cimbalom lend color and character to the music which tempts Manru to forget his duty. The contest in Manru's soul has musical delineation in an extended orchestral introduction to the last act, in which Gipsy and Polish music are at war, while clouds and moon struggle for the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Mr. Fezziwig at Christmas time, and tells him to let the young men in his shop have a jolly time of it, put by their work, listen to the fiddle, ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... "Now dat berry unlucky Massa Tom, dat Sam play big drum. Big drum fine music, but big drum not go well by self. If Sam had played fiddle, Sam could go, but Sam couldn't go nohow ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... what fiddled when Rome was burning," Abe replied. "He's got nothing on you. You would fiddle if Rome, Watertown, and Ogdensburg ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass
... true enough. I would we had more talk about God His Majesty in this household, and less of Popish trinkets and fiddle-faddle.... Well, sir; do you think ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... friendship struck up between Frohman and Stoddart, who, in a way, was a character. He played the violin, and when business was bad and the company got in the dumps Stoddart added to their misfortunes by playing doleful tunes on his fiddle. But that fiddle had a virtue not to be despised, because it was Stoddart's bank. In its hollow box he secreted his modest savings, and in more than one emergency they were drawn on for company bed and board. When the organization ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... sometimes began at nine o'clock in the morning. The three black men from Cedar House who played for the dancing were in their places long before that hour, with their instruments already in tune. One had an old fiddle, another the remnant of a guitar, and the third a clumsy iron triangle which he had made himself. Nevertheless they were famous for their dance music and known throughout the wilderness to all the dancers. Those old-time country fiddlers—all of them, black or white—how wonderful ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... those fiddling fellows are extraordinary. They really play very decently. They must have a lot of talent, when you think of all the different things they do besides their feats of strength—they act, and play the fiddle, and ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... commendation by him that composed it: and though the borrower of it preached it, word for word, as it was at first, yet it was utterly disliked as it was preached by the second to his congregation, which the sermon-borrower complained of to the lender of it: and was thus answered: " I lent you, indeed, my fiddle, but not my fiddle-stick; for you are to know, that every one cannot make musick with my words, which are fitted for my own mouth". And so, my scholar, you are to know, that as the ill pronunciation or ill accenting of words in a sermon spoils it, so the ill carriage of your line, ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... his tour through the Highlands, 1772, says that, at a death, the friends of the deceased meet with bagpipe or fiddle, when the nearest of kin leads off a melancholy ball, dancing and wailing at the same time, which continue till daybreak, and is continued nightly till the interment. This custom is to frighten off or protect the corpse from the attack of wild beasts, and evil spirits ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... about ten o'clock on the following evening, was seated on a sofa, between Mrs. Greatgirdle and Mrs. Waddledot (the two mamas deputed to open the campaign), each with a cup of very prime Mocha coffee, and a massive fiddle-pattern tea-spoon. On the opposite side of the room, in a corner, was a very large cage, in the sole occupancy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... expectation. All are seated—all look at each other in ominous anxiety. Which is accuser? Which is the accused? On whom shall their suspicion settle—on whom their pity? All are silent—almost speechless— and even the current of their thoughts is frost-bound by fear. Suddenly the sound of a fiddle or a viol is caught from a distance—it swells upon the ear—steps approach—and in another moment in rushes the elderly gentleman, grave and gloomy as his audience, but capering about in a frenzy of excitement. For half an hour he continues ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... every night, the place was ablaze with light. Big oil lamps by the score, backed by polished reflectors, illumined the interior. From within came the strains of guitars and the gay scrapings of a fiddle, mingled with the hum of Spanish voices, an occasional oath in English, and the ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... branch! I loved my little sister Anna, too. But what did they do to her behind those marble walls? Did you fiddle for her? What was she when they let her go? My pretty little Anna! The fires of hell for those damned green stones of yours, Stefani! She heard of them and wanted to see them, ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... good view of the village. In the evening our musicians were called for. Then the absence of Griffin Leeds was regretted, as he played the violin; but Cobbington declared that he had played that instrument for years before he left home: only he had no fiddle. Fortunately, Landy Perkins, who played the violoncello, and was learning to play the violin, had one, ...
— Down South - or, Yacht Adventure in Florida • Oliver Optic
... hill together. I was glad to have her visit her brother's home once more. Change was coming to him as well as to her. His prodigious muscles and his boyish gayety were fading away together. Though still delightfully jolly and hospitable, his temper was distinctly less buoyant. He still played the fiddle; but like his brother, David, he found less and less joy in it, for his stiffened fingers refused to do his bidding. The strings which once sang clear and sweet, failed of their proper pitch, and these ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... place at the head of the table, where he had sat ever since the father left it. Uncle Neil was very much beloved, but he was in no sense the head of the family. He was a gay, easy-going body, given to singing songs and playing the fiddle, and not at all calculated to keep a virile group of boys and girls in order. So, John, the eldest son at home, was the real head of the family, and his mother's support. For John was wise and strong and many, many years older ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... in with fiddle-strings, Stuck about with bits 'n' patches, Fixed with ligatures 'n' springs, Lath 'n' plastered, swung in slings Skewered with little wooden matches, Hung with hinges, knobs ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... 'Kit-cat' took its name, Few critics can unriddle: Some say from 'pastrycook' it came, And some, from 'cat' and 'fiddle.' ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... but to have him sitting in that office, writing letters for the boss, and going over the books, and superintending the accounts of the fellows, so that he knows just what they get on Saturday nights, and being as fine as a fiddle, is what the boys won't stand; and they swear they'll leave, every man of 'em, unless he ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... Valdor," cried one or two eager voices, while several heads leaned forward in the direction of the fiercely- moustached man who sat next to Lotys. "Where have you been with your fiddle? Do you arrive among us to-night infected by the pay, or the ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... dreadfully inclined to music since he had a drum, and I want the fiddle to see if I can't make another Pickaninny or an Old Bull of him. Jews-harps is simple, though I can't see how King David played on one of 'em, and sung his psalms at the same time; but the fiddle is best, because genius can show ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... justly to be called, a pokeful of old condemned errors and the filthy vile lusts of the flesh, a published whore-monger, a common gross drunkard, continually and godlessly scraping and skirling on a fiddle, continually breathing flames against the remnant of Israel. But the Lord put an end to his piping, and all these offences were composed into one bloody grave.' No doubt this was written to excuse his slaughter; and I have never heard it claimed for Walker that he was either a just witness ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rather you'd come up and had some ale than disturbed the cover'; a hint that the wily ones immediately took, rushing up to the house, and availing themselves of the absence of the butler, who had followed the hounds, to take a couple of dozen of his best fiddle-handled forks while the footman was ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... to pieces and put together again, strengthened, soldered, tinkered, mended, and braced every accordion, guitar, melodeon, dulcimer, and fiddle in Edgewood, Pleasant River, and the neighboring villages. There was a little money to be earned in this way, but very little, as people in general regarded this "tinkering" as a pleasing diversion in which they could ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... observed Mr Carker, taking up a pen, with which to endorse a memorandum on the back of the paper. 'I hope he may bestow it on some orphan nephew of a musical friend. It may perhaps stop his fiddle-playing, if he has a gift that ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... cicadas sing their loudest, and the crickets draw the bow, And the 'hoppers and the locusts join the chorus, soft and low; And you hear the bees a humming like a fiddle with one string, While the air just seems to vibrate with a soothing kind ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... was over there; and how he did play! how they did dance! Commonly, as the young folks said, he could play only one tune, "Joe Roe and I;" for it is true that his sleepy violin did always seem to whine out, "Joe Roe and I, Joe Roe and I, Joe Roe and I." But now the old fiddle was wide awake. He cut capers on it; and made it laugh, and cry, and whistle, and snort, and scream. He held it close to his ear, and rolled up the whites of his eyes, and laughed a great, loud, rollicking laugh; and he made his ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker
... the beast in front of him, and how proud and disrespectful a horse in a dogcart can seem to those behind it! Moreover, unaccustomed as he was to horses, he was struck by the strong resemblance a bird's-eye view of a horse bears to a fiddle, a ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... played upon his fiddle All through that leafy June, He always played hey-diddle-diddle, And played it ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... closer to him on the bench a stark fiddle-bow, mickle and long, made like a sword, sharp and broad. There sat the good knights unafraid. They deemed them too high to rise from their seat through fear ...
— The Fall of the Niebelungs • Unknown
... undo him. His stern young face was like a mask of something that had once been beautiful with life, whose utter sorrow and hopelessness pierced one at the sight. And so he stood and looked at Elder Harricutt, who shot him one glance and then looking down began to fiddle with his watch ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... impulse to spring upward on the "light fantastic toe." On that eve, such an impulse had inspired the limbs of the Mormon emigrants. Scarcely had the debris of the supper been removed, ere a space was cleared midway between the blazing fires; music swelled upon the air—the sounds of fiddle, horn, and clarionet—and half a score of couples, setting themselves en quadrille, commence treading time to the tune. Sufficiently bizarre was the exhibition—a dance of the true "broad-horn" breed; but we had no thought of criticising an entertainment so opportune to our purpose. The ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... of minstrel, dressed in a sort of garment which was no longer an overcoat and had not yet assumed the shape of a shortcoat. He was strumming on a wretched fiddle; but his voice was good, and the ballad he sang had the full flavor of the ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... thought he was using Dryfoos, when Dryfoos was using him, and he may have supposed he was not afraid of him when he was very much so. His courage hadn't been put to the test, and courage is a matter of proof, like proficiency on the fiddle, you know: you can't tell whether you've got it till ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... warn't dese here huggin' kind of dances lak dey has now. Dere warn't no Big Apple nor no Little Apple neither. Us had a house wid a raised flatform (platform) at one end whar de music-makers sot. Dey had a string band wid a fiddle, a trumpet, and a banjo, but dere warn't no guitars lak dey has in dis day. One man called de sets and us danced de cardrille (quadrille) de virginia reel, and de 16-hand cortillion. When us made syrup on de farm dere would always be a candy pullin'. Dat homemade syrup made real good ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... art, with which, wandering up and down at wakes and fairs, he cheered the rural nymphs and swains, when upon the green they interweaved the sprightly dance; while he himself stood fiddling and jumping to his own music. How little now avails his fiddle! He thumps the verdant floor with his carcass. Next old Echepole, the sow-gelder, received a blow in his forehead from our Amazonian heroine, and immediately fell to the ground. He was a swinging ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... said the Learned Man; 'out of my house! I've had enough of you, and I've no time for fiddle-faddle! It's ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... and a fiddle and a bass viol," he said reflectively. "Never kept time—the bass viol didn't. Couldn't never get it into his head. He wasn't never any shakes of a player—and he was ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... o' gold would buy anything you wanted, Peter says. He told me about it, Peter Fiddle did. Once a boy found a pot o' gold hangin' on to the end of a rainbow. There's always one there, Daddy. Yes, there is, Peter Fiddle says so. An' a boy travelled a long, long way to the end of a rainbow, an' he found it—the pot o' gold. An' ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... May milkmaids used to borrow silver cups, tankards, &c., to hang them round their milkpails, with the addition of flowers and ribbons, which they carried upon their heads, accompanied by a bagpipe or fiddle, and went from door to door, dancing before the houses of their customers, in order to obtain a small gratuity ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... told our fortunes, and talked like a printed book. Then there was his wife, and the slip of a girl who bowled over Blake there, and half a dozen ragged brats; and a fellow on a tramp, not a gipsy—some runaway apprentice, I take it, but a jolly dog—with no luggage but an old fiddle on which he scraped away uncommonly well, and set Blake making rhymes as we sat in the tent. You never heard any of his songs. Here's one for each of us; we're going to get up the characters and sing them about the country;—now for a ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... world he did not know, the world from which she had just returned. She was playing the prelude of the simplest song that ever had been taught in an Edinburgh academy, yet these ears, accustomed only to rough men's voices, the song of birds, now and then a harsh fiddle grating for its life about the country-side, or the pipe of the hills, imbued the thin and lonely symphony with associations of life genteel and wide, rich and warm and white-handed. Never seemed Miss Nan so far removed as then from him, the home-staying dreamer. Up rose his startled judgment ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... yard a sound of tuning instruments, squeak of fiddle, croon of 'cello, a falling triangle ringing and tinkling to the ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... them all day, and it is worth remarking that they having met Mr. Evans and the one seamen led them down to the beach and even gave them a duck each to eat on their making signs of their hunger. We had a drum, fife and fiddle on shore with us but on playing and beating they signified their displeasure and some of them ran off but on our ceasing returned. We made them presents of caps, tomahawks, etc., but they would give nothing in return. Their spears and waddas are much the same as at ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... Peggy with a shrug. "It's meself that's second fiddle this moment, when 'twas the whole orchestra I expected to be. Take me away, somebody, before I break down altogether, and show me some of the old haunts ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... melt the belly out of my fiddle," said Johnny Mears to his wife, who sat on a three-legged stool by the rough table in the little whitewashed "end-room", putting a patch of patches over the seat of a pair of moleskin knickerbockers. He lit his pipe, moved a stool to the side of the great empty fireplace, where ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... Wood-Sun, Sunbeam, and Bowmay are wholesome women to meet in a story, and Thiodolf, Gold-mane, Iron-face and Hallward are every inch men for book-use or to commune with every day. Weaklings, too, abide in these stories, and Penny-thumb and Rusty and Fiddle and Wood-grey ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... but few men in the ship who would venture a wrestle with the boatswain, who was very appropriately distinguished by the cognomen of Jemmy Ducks. Jemmy was a sensible, merry fellow, and a good seaman: you could not affront him by any jokes on his figure, for he would joke with you. He was indeed the fiddle of the ship's company, and he always played the fiddle to them when they danced, on which instrument he was no mean performer; and, moreover, accompanied his voice with his instrument when he sang to them after they were tired of dancing. We shall only observe ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Donald heartily. "When you do it you think it's going to be easy as fiddle to slip it back again; but it doesn't seem to turn out that way. Jove, but I'm glad I'm clear of ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... Harriette, and Herr Driesbach like it any less? What shall avenge them for their spretae injuria formae? What can repay the hapless performer, who has performed her very best, for learning by terrible, indisputable indirections that her cherished and boasted Cremona is but a very second fiddle? ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... established a lead, and Mr Carr's deviation to the left was a triumph of smiling composure; nevertheless, Pixie's sharp eyes had seen and understood, and her heart felt a natural girlish pang. At twenty it is hard to accept with resignation the part of second fiddle, and Pixie's generosity had its limits—as whose has not? She had looked at Honor's pretty face and costly gown, had heard of her wealth and independence with the purest and most ungrudging pleasure, but when ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... through the garden gap, Whom should I meet but Dick Red-cap,— A stick in his hand, A stone in his throat,— If you'll tell me this riddle, I'll give you a gold fiddle. (A cherry) ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... and princesses of ancient France? Why, the dark-skinned old-clo' men, who hang their cast-off raiment in Brattle Street, would be mobbed, if they paraded such vestments at their doors; and Papanti would break his fiddle-bow over the head of any awkward lout who should unfortunately assume such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... voices rising upon the wintry air, and the tumbling of glossy curls underneath the hoods and sealskin caps as they sped through the delightful hours. Tullie Wasson was out there with his string band—Tullie with his old black fiddle, and Jim Grey with his cornet, and his son with his wondrous bass violin, and Tullie knew all the good old tunes, and a few fancy waltzes and polkas, but he was at his best in the Virginia Reel, and it was a pretty sight to see the joyous couples ranging off to their positions for the ice dance, ...
— Shawn of Skarrow • James Tandy Ellis
... organ,' observed Logotheti. 'It does almost everything. It sinks, it swells, it falls, it leaps, it stands still, it quivers, it gets into one's throat and it breaks; but it goes on beating all the time with more or less regularity, just as the violin clown scrapes his fiddle while he turns somersaults, sticks out his tongue, sits down with frightful suddenness and tumbles in and out ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... in the Nibelungenlied in the person of "Volker von Alzeie,'' the warrior who in the last part of the epic plays a part second only to that of Hagen, and who "was called the minstrel (spilman) because he could fiddle.'' It became an imperial city in 1277. In 1620 it was sacked by the Spaniards and in 1689 burnt by the French. Annexed to France during the Napoleonic wars, it passed in 1815 to the grand-duchy of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... for the moment. He noted an undercurrent of rejoicing and triumphant cheeriness in the tone of the stream as it plashed among the pebbles on its precipitous bed that suggested to his mind some bars of a symphony which he determined to compose as soon as he got home again to his beloved fiddle. ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... sweethearts the ball. The fife and the fiddle all merrily sound, Thy twine, and they glide, and with nimbleness bound, Thy whisper, and ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... door stood a half-grown boy, stamping his feet to keep warm, as he droned out in sing-song fashion: "Walk in, gentlefolk, and have your razors ground; we have all manner of kitchen furniture in cutlery within, also catgut and fiddle strings ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... also small, a grayish, quiet, silent little old man. He is under his wife's thumb; he was doorkeeper in this very house even at the time when Anna Markovna served here as housekeeper. In order to be useful in some way, he has learned, through self-instruction, to play the fiddle, and now at night plays dance tunes, as well as a funeral march for shopmen far gone on a spree and ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... small fiddle; to crowd v. to grate as the two ends of a broken bone, to make a flat creaking; Crowder s. ...
— A Glossary of Provincial Words & Phrases in use in Somersetshire • Wadham Pigott Williams
... variety and excitement leads the crow to investigate any unusual sight or sound that catches his attention. Hide anywhere in the woods, and make any queer sound you will—play a jews'-harp, or pull a devil's fiddle, or just call softly—and first comes a blue jay, all agog to find out all about it. Next a red squirrel steals down and barks just over your head, to make you start if possible. Then, if your eyes are sharp, you will see a crow gliding from ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... with wondering eyes, extracting those marvellously sweet sounds from his wooden instrument, until, with the child's spirit of imitation, as his parents sang their "Volkslieder," the little fellow, perched on a stone bench, gravely handled two pieces of wood of his own as if they were bow and fiddle, keeping exact time, and flourishing the bow in the approved fashion of the schoolmaster. From this very little incident came an important change in his life; for a relation, Johann Mathias Frankh, of Hainburg, happened to be present ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... liked the 'Magic Fiddle,'" said Nora, with a reminiscent chuckle. "I used to keep a copy of Grimms' Fairy Tales in my desk at school, just for that story. It always made me giggle. I could fairly see all those poor people dancing whether they wished to dance or not. Ask Hippy what his favorite fairy tale is," ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... Mrs. Bovey had them all into the parlour, where she was sitting dressed in white and silver. She showed them her clothes and her jewels, talked pleasantly and with great good nature to them, and having given to each of them sixpence she dismissed them. When they left her they had a harp and fiddle playing in the great hall, where they danced two hours and went away in good time. When Mrs. Bovey was dressing before dinner she said to Mrs. Vergo, 'Rachel, you will be surprised that I put such fine clothes on to-day; but I think that these ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... and where about the only regular musical diversion is going to church on Sunday morning and betting on where the veteran soprano in the choir is going to hang on to the key or skid on the high turns. You laugh at me because I can't eat down-town unless I am encouraged by a bull fiddle, and because I gulp at free concert tickets like a young robin swallowing worms. But if most of your life had been spent listening to Mrs. Sim Estabrook jumping for middle C about as successfully as a dog jumps for a squirrel in a hickory ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... you," Sandy agreed; "but there's an old bear that I want first. He's got a foot as big as a fiddle; I'll bet he weighs as ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... quite in the vein of Dean Swift, entitled "Rules for reducing a Great Empire to a Small One." The opening sentences were as follows: "An ancient sage valued himself upon this, that, though he could not fiddle, he knew how to make a great city of a little one. The science that I, a modern simpleton, am about to communicate, is the very reverse;" and with this introduction the author proceeds to give a detailed account of the treatment ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other; and yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board. One, whose offence for which he had been sold was an overfondness for his wife, played the fiddle almost continually, and the others danced, sang, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards from day to day. How true it is that 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,' or in other words, that he renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... by Mr Paton to that of the Scotch Highlander; and it is not without strong points of resemblance. "He is brave in battle, highly hospitable; delights in simple and plaintive music and poetry, his favourite instruments being the bagpipe and fiddle; unlike the Greek, he shows little aptitude for trade; and, unlike the Bulgarian, he is very lazy in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... CALF-SKIN FIDDLE. A drum. To smack calf's skin; to kiss the book in taking an oath. It is held by the St. Giles's casuists, that by kissing one's thumb instead of smacking calf's skin, the guilt of taking ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... that night a long, long time ago when all the people under the protection of the newly erected fort, gathered here for a house-warming. How clearly I could hear that squawking, squeaking, good-natured fiddle and the din of dancing feet! Only the sound got mixed up with the dim, weird moonlight, until you didn't know whether you were hearing or seeing or feeling it—the music of the fiddles and the feet. Oh, the ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... warmed by the old liquor, caught the first bars of a tune he had known in his youth; and lifting high his voice he sang it over and over again. He passed a negro cabin whence often had proceeded at night the penetrating cry of a fiddle, and it was night now but no fiddle sent forth its whine. A dog shoved open the door, and by the fire light within the old man saw a negro sitting with a gun across his lap, and beside him stood two boys, looking with rapture upon their father's weapon. Throughout the neighborhood ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... to Handsomelake, 'Tell your people, and particularly the keeper of the faith, to be strong-minded and adhere to the true faith. We fear the evil-minded will go among them with tempations. He may introduce the fiddle; he may bring cards and leave them among you; the use of these is a great sin. Let the people be on their guard and the keepers of the faith be watchful and vigilant that none of these evils may find their way among the people. Let the keepers of the faith preserve ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... would a-wooing go Gave a party, you must know; And his bride, dressed all in green, Looked as fine as any queen. Their reception numbered some Of the best in Froggiedom. Four gay froggies played the fiddle,— Hands all round, and down ...
— The Nursery, February 1877, Vol. XXI. No. 2 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... of his invention), and a Chinese pavilion, the most hideous building in the world. He could drive a four-in-hand very nearly as well as the Brighton coachman, could fence elegantly, and it is said, played the fiddle well. And he smiled with such irresistible fascination, that persons who were introduced into his august presence became his victims, body and soul, as a rabbit becomes the prey of a great ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... this, we hesitated. Could we ask a man who owned books, and could probably read, to play second fiddle to a woman who could not speak the English language, and who for years, perhaps, had devoted the energies of her soul ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... of check, and tallowed hair, The fiddler sits in the bulrush chair Like Moses' basket stranded there On the brink of Father Nile. He feels the fiddle's slender neck, Picks out the note, with thrum and check; And times the tune with nod and beck, And thinks it a weary while. All ready! Now he gives the call, Cries, "Honor to the ladies!" All The jolly tides of laughter fall And ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... in their white coiffes and black shawls, and the men in their round Breton hats with buckles and streaming ribbons, while knots began to collect about the doors of the village cafes, and laughter, gossip and the sound of the fiddle arose on the sunny air, Geoffroi would gather a circle round him to hear his quips and odd stories, and to join in the fun that he would mercilessly make of others less quick than himself at repartee. It was extraordinary on these occasions how Geoffroi, like a spider ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... and examine my arc! Fwizz! How's that for high, and for vivid and sparky! I obviate dirt, and I dissipate dark. You just let me in; the result you'll be charmed at. Objections, Old Boy, are all fiddle-de-dee. Come now! I'm sure you cannot be alarmed at A dear little chap ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 29, 1891 • Various
... scenes of Paris, in time of war, and in thousands of other rooms, whose window-curtains were drawn to veil their light from hostile aircraft, the people who come to Paris as the great university of intellect and emotion, continued their studies and their way of life, with vibrations of fiddle-strings and scraping of palettes ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... soon have things as fit as a fiddle," said Tom, throwing off some of his superfluous garments so as to be ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... had a dance, and here I became useful, being able to play Scotch reels and Irish jigs on the fiddle. Then we had songs and yarns again. Some could tell of furious fights with whales that made our blood boil; others could talk of the green fields at home, until we almost fancied we were boys again; and some could not tell stories at all. They had little ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... he did play! how they did dance! Commonly, as the young folks said, he could play only one tune, "Joe Roe and I;" for it is true that his sleepy violin did always seem to whine out, "Joe Roe and I, Joe Roe and I, Joe Roe and I." But now the old fiddle was wide awake. He cut capers on it; and made it laugh, and cry, and whistle, and snort, and scream. He held it close to his ear, and rolled up the whites of his eyes, and laughed a great, loud, rollicking laugh; and he made his fiddle laugh, ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker
... hunting and fishing, and promised to be a good sportsman from a very early age. Their grandfather's ship was sailing for Europe once when the boys were children, and they were asked, what present Captain Franks should bring them back? George was divided between books and a fiddle; Harry instantly declared for a little gun: and Madam Warrington (as she then was called) was hurt that her elder boy should have low tastes, and applauded the younger's choice as more worthy of his name and lineage. "Books, papa, I can fancy to be a good choice," she replied to her father, who tried ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and change my dreaming. From the mufflers in which his father, the mountebank, has wrapped the child, to carry him across the heath, a little tumbling-boy emerges in soiled tights. He is half asleep. His father scrapes the fiddle. The boy shortens his red belt, kisses his fingers to us, and ties himself into a knot among the glasses ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... jolly!" she piped, "and I've just had the very gloriousest tramp and I feel as fine as a—what is it they say? Oh, as fine as a violin—I—I mean fiddle. I walked miles and miles—perhaps not quite so far—and the wind was blowing a blue streak right in my face. Ugh! first it made me shiver and creep up into my collar. But bimeby I got nice and warmy, and my cheeks tingled. I felt as if I could walk from here to ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... there was a grand band hired from Rosseter, who, with their wonderful wind-instruments and puffed-out cheeks, were themselves a delightful show to the small boys and girls. To say nothing of Joshua Rann's fiddle, which, by an act of generous forethought, he had provided himself with, in case any one should be of sufficiently pure taste to prefer dancing to a ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... Nice, where the Duke of Savoy held his court; there he entered the service of the Duke of Moreto, and this lord having been appointed, some years afterwards, to the Scottish embassy, Rizzio followed him to Scotland. As this young man had a very fine voice, and accompanied on the viol and fiddle songs of which both the airs and the words were of his own composition, the ambassador spoke of him to Mary, who wished to see him. Rizzio, full of confidence in himself, and seeing in the queen's desire a road to success, hastened to obey her command, sang before her, and pleased her. ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Polson,' said the General, encountering the Sergeant halfway along the deck, 'that it's unluckier for an old fellow to get bowled over than it is for a young one. You may be as fit as a fiddle again in a month or two, and may have your fill of fighting for Queen and country; but I have done my last day's work, and that is a weary thing to ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... steel, stiff and unyielding. Both sails were snow-white, semi-transparent and supple in movement, like the ivory sails on the model ships in Rosenborg Palace. The mast seemed to bend slightly and the stays were as taut as fiddle-strings. The boat quivered like a leaf. The waves pounded hard against the thin strakes of the boat's side. I could feel them on my cheek, though their dampness never penetrated; but in between these hammer blows ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... sloping lawns blazed with flowers. My mother said it was much prettier than Kaskaskia; not crowded with traffic; not overrun with foreigners. Everybody seemed to be making a fete, to be visiting or receiving visits. At sunset the fiddle and the banjo began their melody. The young girls would gather at Barbeau's or Le Compt's or Pensonneau's—at any one of a dozen places, and the young men would follow. It was no trouble to have a dance every evening, and on feast days and great days ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... mechanical, all over the great factory, was now strained almost to the breaking-point. How long can this agony last? How long can the roar and the rush and the throbbing pain continue until that nameless and unknown something snaps like an overstrained fiddle-string and brings relief? The remorseless clock informed us that there were two hours more of this torture before the signal to "clean up"—a signal, however, which is not given until the last girl has finished her allotted task. At half-past two it appeared ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... free life. The Negro songs, those that he has remembered best, are religious and other worldly. "It is a singular fact," says Krehbiel, "that very few secular songs—those which are referred to as 'reel tunes,' 'fiddle songs,' 'corn songs' and 'devil songs,' for which slaves generally expressed a deep abhorrence, though many of them no doubt were used to stimulate them while in the fields—have been preserved while 'shout songs' and other 'speritchils' have been kept alive ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... vibrations, such as all air currents tend to produce. An AEolian harp illustrates the action which we are considering. Moving over matter which has the qualities that we denote by the term fluid, the swayings which the air produces are of a peculiar sort, though they much resemble those of the fiddle string. The surface of the liquid rises and falls in what we term waves, the size of which is determined by the measure of fluidity, and by the energy of the wind. Thus, because fresh water is considerably ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... "I fiddle a little. I try to learn something different for them every time. The last time I learned to do conjuring tricks. They'd get tired of me if I didn't bring something new. I'm thinking of learning the penny whistle before ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... prototype to turn pamphleteer and revile his benefactors. Mme. de Bargeton in her little circle of five or six persons, who were supposed to share her tastes for art and letters, because this one scraped a fiddle, and that splashed sheets of white paper, more or less, with sepia, and the other was president of a local agricultural society, or was gifted with a bass voice that rendered Se fiato in corpo like a war whoop—Mme. de Bargeton amid these grotesque figures was like a famished ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... about me!" he objected trying hard to smile, though racked with pain. "I'll be O. K., fit as a fiddle, in no time. Perfect health and all that sort of thing, you ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... the rollicking music back of the paying booth. Three sable musicians form the orchestra, and from a bass viol, fiddle and fife they extract melody that, with all its short-coming, would make a deacon wish to dance. Any one, white or black, can purchase the privilege of keeping step to the music for two cents, or one strawberry ticket. Business was superb, and every shade of color and ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... that, like good Father Philip, in the romance of "The Monastery," they seemed utterly unable to change their tune. "Cherry ripe!" "Cherry ripe!" was the universal cry of all the idle in the town. Every unmelodious voice gave utterance to it; every crazy fiddle, every cracked flute, every wheezy pipe, every street organ was heard in the same strain, until studious and quiet men stopped their ears in desperation, or fled miles away into the fields or woodlands, to be at peace. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... diddle, The cat and the fiddle, The cow jumped over the moon; The little dog laughed To see such craft, And the dish ran ...
— Traditional Nursery Songs of England - With Pictures by Eminent Modern Artists • Various
... proper relation as to size and position, and the perfect adaptation of each part. A split sounding-board spoils the pianoforte, the indented bell destroys the sweet tone of the French horn, and a cracked fiddle is ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... fluent, and diffluent for us, both in mediaeval and recent times, with the most Essential oil of Turpentine, and Myrrh or Frankincense of temper and imagination, which may be typified by it, producible in Germany; especially if we think how the more delicate uses of Rosin, as indispensable to the Fiddle-bow, have developed themselves, from the days of St. Elizabeth of Marburg to those of St. ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... the fiddle, Its strings loudly giggled, The bailiff's man wriggled Ahead for a spree. "Hold!" shouted Ola And tripped him to tumbling, The bailiff's man ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... was cramped and sticky, with small fields and blind fences. Now, White Stockings is an animal of great circumspection, and allows no earthly consideration to hurry him. He is, moreover, as strong as a dray-horse, and as handy, so John declares, "as a fiddle." To him, therefore, was entrusted the honour of carrying me on my first appearance with the Heavy-top hounds. The meet was at no great distance from Dangerfield Hall, and being the beginning of the season, and a favourite ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... suspects that he lacks the true inspiration, he had better try the confidence game, and induce the public to admire by writing that which no one can understand. It would seem, too, that writing poetry and playing on the fiddle have this much in common, that a true genius at either is fit for nothing else. The amateurs can take care of themselves, but the born-masters display an amiable worthlessness for every thing but their art. Now General Thompson ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... proves not right, I'll e'en forswear this Town and all their false Wares, amongst which, zoz, I believe they vent as many false Wives as any Metropolitan in Christendom, I'll say that for't, and a Fiddle for't, i'faith:—come give me my Watch out,—so, my Diamond Rings too: so, I think I shall appear pretty ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... out, "Don't take HIM," he says, "whatever you do! He's only a poor young chap from the country, and butter wouldn't melt in his mouth!" However, they - ha, ha, ha! - they took me, and pretended to search my bedroom, where nothing was found but an old fiddle belonging to the landlord, that had got there somehow or another. But, it entirely changed the landlord's opinion, for when it was produced, he says, "My fiddle! The Butcher's a purloiner! I give him into custody for the robbery of a ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... and are sharp and symmetrical; the cut-water stretches, with a graceful curve, far out beyond them toward the long sweeping martingal, and is surmounted by a gilt scroll, or, as the sailors call it, a fiddle-head. The black stern is ornamented by a group of white figures in bas relief, which give a lively air to the otherwise sombre and vacant expression, and beneath the cabin-windows is painted the name of the ship, and her port of register. The lower masts of this vessel are short and stout, the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... of Heroes and Peace Seem'd to smile at the sound of the fiddle, Proud to fill up each tall shining space Round the lanthorn[1] that stood in the middle. And GEORGE'S head too; Heav'n screen him! May he finish in peace his long reign! And what did we when we had seen him? Why—went round and saw ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... blue eyes, very beautiful teeth, and a golden beard. His appearance was grave, but not morose, as if he were always examining things and people without condemning them. It was evident that he expected to take the upper hand in general, to play the first fiddle, to hold the top saw, to "be helped to all the stuffing of the pumpkin," as dear Uncle Sam was fond of saying. Of moderate stature, almost of middle age, and dressed nicely, without any gewgaws, which look so common upon a gentleman's front, he was likely to please more people ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... started, Freyberg realised that he might do better in Europe. He therefore deserted Villa, and set out afoot for San Francisco. His splendid constitution stood him in good stead, and he arrived there as fit as a fiddle, soon afterwards winning enough money in a swimming race to take him to London. In the English capital he received a commission as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Division, and his promotion ...
— Some Naval Yarns • Mordaunt Hall
... poetry that I allers tunes my voice up to the occasion with," he said. "I do it sorter like a fiddler tunes up his fiddle. It's a great poem an' I'll put it agin anything in the Queen's English for real thunder music an' a sentiment that Shakespeare an' Milton nor none of 'em cud a writ. It stirs me like our park of artillery at Shiloh, ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... beat her, uttering fearful curses. If he caught her praying, he said, he would "give her hell." Mary was a member of the Methodist Church in Washington. There were several pious people in the company; and at night, when the driver found them melancholy and disposed to pray, he had a fiddle brought, and made them dance in their chains, whipping them till they complied. Mary at length became so weak that she really could travel on foot no further. Her feeble frame was exhausted, and sank beneath accumulated ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... too patently didactic or doctrinaire; we suspect that they have been motives determining the action; our scepticism as to the disinterested conduct of the story is aroused by its too plainly deduced moral. We catch the powers at play which ought to be invisible; we fiddle with the works of the clock till it ceases to strike. Yet if only a part of Browning's mind is alive in these early poems, the faculties brought into exercise are the less impeded by one another; the love of beauty is not tripped up by a delight in the grotesque. ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... a tall, handsome black fellow, with white teeth and bright eyes, and he could play the fiddle and pick the banjo, and knock the bones and cut the pigeon-wing, and, besides all that, he was the best hoe-hand, and could pick more cotton than any other negro on the plantation. He had amused himself by courting and flirting with all of the negro girls; but at last he had been caught ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... "Please don't fiddle with those candlesticks. They're the rarest American workmanship, and if you were to break one of them Aunt Marion would kill me. I'll feel safer about ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... under different skies, but never such a one as this. So far, far from all that one associates with this evening. I think of the merriment round the bonfires at home, hear the scraping of the fiddle, the peals of laughter, and the salvoes of the guns, with the echoes answering from the purple-tinted heights. And then I look out over this boundless, white expanse into the fog and sleet and the driving wind. Here is truly no trace ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... is certain the institution of the true critics was of absolute necessity to the commonwealth of learning. For all human actions seem to be divided like Themistocles and his company. One man can fiddle, and another can make a small town a great city; and he that cannot do either one or the other deserves to be kicked out of the creation. The avoiding of which penalty has doubtless given the first birth ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... the crime of taking steps to music as a change from the pious freedom of kissing parties. There was one sacrilegious person named Joe Dencie living in the east-side neighborhood, who could not only "make a fiddle talk," as the saying was, but "call off" and keep time and head, foot, both arms and entire body as well, and at once. To describe his ability more completely it might be said that he fiddled and danced at ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... they do spin! when they truly begin; Each dancer as airy and bright as a doll; While the music complete, keeps time to their feet, With its fiddle-dee-diddle and tol-de-rol-ol! ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... red-haired young lady had known that he possessed so beautiful a voice. It had a clearness without effort, a tone, a truth, a pathos, such as I have not often heard. It sounded strangely above the nasal tones of the school-children, and the scraping of a solitary fiddle. Even our neighbour, who had lustily followed the rhythm of the tune, though without much varying from the note on which he responded, softened his own sounds and turned to look at the Irishman, who sang on without noticing it, till, in the last verse, he seemed disturbed to discover ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... speaking to his son, 'Now, my bonny man, I'm going to Liverpool to-day, what shall I bring you? You may choose what you like: only let it be little, for I shall walk there and back: sixty miles each way, that is a long spell!' Hindley named a fiddle, and then he asked Miss Cathy; she was hardly six years old, but she could ride any horse in the stable, and she chose a whip. He did not forget me; for he had a kind heart, though he was rather severe sometimes. He promised to bring me a pocketful of apples and pears, ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... child, likewise sawed one stick upon another in imitation of playing the fiddle. And there's Little Babe of Lonesome Creek who delights in a gourd banjo. His grandsir, finding a straight, long-necked gourd among those clustered on the vine over kitchen-house door, fashioned it into ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... were going to supper, an old man, with a fiddle in his hand, tottered into the garden, and down the lawn. He was a very queer-looking old man. He had long white hair, and ...
— The Birthday Party - A Story for Little Folks • Oliver Optic
... derelict in the streets of a far city,—those two atoms shaken into contact while the gods affected to be engaged with weightier matters,—the cultured widow of that derelict recalled the name of a gentleman in the East who was accustomed to buy tall clocks and fiddle-backed chairs, in her native New England, paying prices therefor to make one, in that conservative locality, rich beyond the ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... the first blow he has laid Full fifteen warriors low: "Ha bravely, Folker Spillemand, You touch your fiddle bow!" ...
— Grimhild's Vengeance - Three Ballads • Anonymous
... it is not serious," Saunders said. "I have seen him break down before. He is too intense, too strenuous; whatever he does he does with every nerve in his body drawn as taut as a fiddle- string." ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... deeper color on his face, and that he clinched both his fists and—thrust them into his pockets. That set her thinking, and the more she thought, the more curious she grew. He played the violin well; suppose she should ask him to come and fiddle at the party her father was to give at the end of the harvest. She resolved to do it, and he, not knowing what moved her, gave his promise eagerly. It struck her, afterward, that she had done a wicked thing, but, like most girls, ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... our Ladies Will haue of these trim vanities? Louell. I marry, There will be woe indeed Lords, the slye whorsons Haue got a speeding tricke to lay downe Ladies. A French Song, and a Fiddle, ha's no Fellow ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... 'A roasted potato and a roll o' butter.' Terry heigho, &c. Supper was laid down to dine, Heigho, &c. Changed a farthing and brought up wine, Terry heigho, &c. First come in was a nimble bee, Heigho, &c. With his fiddle upon his knee, Terry heigho, &c. Next come in was a creeping snail, Heigho, &c. With his bagpipes under his tail, Terry heigho, &c. Next came in was a neighbour's pig, Heigho, &c. 'Pray, good people, will ye play us a jig?' Terry heigho, &c. Next come in was a neighbour's ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... caught near his home by a sudden shower while on horseback, and had dashed in for shelter. While the rain beat outside and while Shiro was preparing one of his famous suppers, Crane had suggested that she pass the time by playing his "fiddle." Dorothy realized, with the first sweep of the bow, that she was playing a Stradivarius, the like of which she had played before only in her dreams. She forgot her listeners, forgot the time and the place, and poured out in her music all the beauty and tenderness ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... two or three younger associates. Their instruments look much the worse for wear, and even my unmusical ear can distinguish more discord than harmony. They appear to be a very quiet and harmless people. Sometimes there is a woman playing on a fiddle, while her husband blows a wind instrument. In the streets it is not unusual to find a band of half a dozen performers, who, without any provocation or reason whatever, sound their brazen instruments till the houses re-echo. Sometimes one passes a man who stands whistling a tune most ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as a goose Sat the Parliament-house, To hatch the royal gull; After much fiddle-faddle The egg proved addle, And ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... 'un!" she would exclaim. "Nay, I rocked her misel i' t' creddle while my shackles fair worked. Shoo taks after her dad, that's what's wrang wi' Lizzie. A feckless gowk was Watmough; he couldn't frame to do owt but play t' fiddle i' t' sky-parlour, or sit ower ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... four in the pound, Lead up the jolly Round, While Cornet shrill i' th' middle Marches, and merry fiddle, Curtal with deep hum, hum, Cries we come, come, And theorbo loudly answers, Thrum, thrum, thrum, thrum, thrum. But, their fingers frost-nipt, So many notes are o'erslipt, That you'd take sometimes The Waits for the Minster chimes: Then, Sirs, to hear their ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... said. "I never do. And I've no enmity against all manner of fiddle-faddling, if folks have got nothin' better to do. But 'tain't so with our girls. They work for their livin', and they've got to work; and what I say is, they're in a way to get to hate work, if they don't despise it, and in my judgment that's a poor business. ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... wild-potato vine, or "man of the earth." It is not very easily overlooked. Several stems spring from the same root, growing and twining seven or eight feet high. The leaves are large, and of various shapes—heart-shaped, pointed, and fiddle-shaped. Three or four large blossoms, several inches broad, grow in clusters; the flowers are white, with purple in the tube. This remarkable vine is found in sandy fields and by road-sides from ...
— Harper's Young People, August 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... their feet. I started to mine, but I discreetly and quietly sat down again. Was it Newport, at last? Not at all. The harbor lights were gleaming from afar; and the cry was of the bandmaster shouting to his emissaries, arousing fiddle and flute and bassoon to their deceitful duty. They had played us out of port—they would play us in again. They had promised us that all should go merry as a marriage-bell, and—I would not be understood to complain, but it had been a sad occasion. Now the deceitful strains rose ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... feelings were in fact too many for her,—and that her efforts to overcome them, and to face the realities of the world, had exhausted her. This was, of course, not said openly, at the town-cross of Exeter; but such was the opinion which Mr. Martin gave in confidence to the mother. "Fiddle-de-dee!" said Camilla, when she was told of feelings, susceptibilities, and hysterics. At the present moment she had a claim to the undivided interest of the family, and she believed that her sister's illness was feigned in order to defraud her of her rights. "My dear, she ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... And the little Hebrew we picked up at college from our good friend the learned young Rabbi, will also stand us in hand. Have you any objection to being my servant, Ned?" "None at all; I shall feel quite honored by the position. I don't consider myself competent to play the first fiddle in this amusing duet, but can follow your lead very well." "Remember, then, that our English is rather broken, and that we communicate our meaning to one another in French, Spanish, scraps of Hebrew, or Latin and Greek. I have not quite ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... only talks to me about the Greek and Latin poets and about music. I say, you don't want to see me squeezing a big fiddle between my knees and sawing at it with a bow as if I wanted to cut all ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... his lips move painfully. "Hex, little two up in the air, cross and a fiddle-de-dee. Lord! what a one ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... slippers ready, and there was a scramble as to who should put them on; but she settled that question by making 'Pollo rise, with his fiddle in his arms, and lend her his chair for a minute while she pulled them on herself. Then she let Pete and Pierre each have one of the discarded slippers as a trophy. Lily had always danced out several pairs of slippers at the Christmas ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... stuttered, One of them stuttered, one of them muttered. Each of them thought far more than he uttered. One crow asked the other crow a riddle. One crow asked the other crow a riddle: The muttering crow Asked the stuttering crow, "Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle? Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle?" "Bee-cause," said the other crow, "Bee-cause, B B B B B B B B B B B ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... wedding at hand, and here's a long-lost intimate friend about to turn up in the midst of it. You'd very much prefer him to stay away; there's nothing to be ashamed of in that. I should myself if I were in your shoes. No fellow cares about playing second fiddle at his own wedding. Now, I've got a little suggestion to make. I was going down to Wastwater to-morrow, but I wouldn't much mind waiting another day if I could only get a fellow to come with me. I always liked Holroyd, you know—capital good chap he is, and if you leave me to manage him, I ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... represented at the head of a procession, all the members of which (herself included) are mounted on braying "jackasses." A figure, intended no doubt for Alderman Wood, habited in a fool's cap and jester's dress, holds her by the hand; the lady who follows him, playing on the fiddle and wearing a Scotch bonnet, is meant for Lady Ann Hamilton (she is named "Lady Ann Bagpipe" in the sketch); Bergami (immediately behind) carries a banner inscribed "Innocence"; and next him, his fat sister, whom the queen had dignified with the title of a countess; ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... 'Lina.) "How that made me gnash my teeth, for I had suspected that I was only playing second fiddle for Alice Johnson, 'darling, precious ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... "Never mind," she answered lightly. "The last verse don't matter anyway. Come to here, Edna. Momma wants to hear your fiddle-playing." ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... and through canvas walls. Now about every other store appeared to be a saloon or gambling room, all crowded. There were other places of amusement, also, even to a sort of a theatre, where miners were dancing with one another, on the floor, to the sound of a fiddle and cracked accordion, while on a stage a thin woman with painted red cheeks was singing and prancing. An auctioneer was selling real estate, from a dry-goods box in the plaza. Stores were open, the streets ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... wot something of the value of time and the mysteries of tune; or, if a country parson, drill cleverly that insubordinate phalanx of soi-disant musicians, a rustic orchestra; and exclude from the latter, at all mortal hazards, the huntsman's horn, the volunteer fiddle, and the shrill squeaking of the wry-necked pipe. Much is being now done for congregational psalmody; but when will country folks give up their murderous execution of the fugue-full anthem, and when ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... allowed much freer scope; the sister is expected to defer to the brother from the time she can walk or talk. In America this difference of training is constantly tending to the vanishing point. The American woman has never learned to play second fiddle. The American girl, as Mr. Henry James says, is rarely negative; she is either (and usually) a most charming success or (and exceptionally) a most disastrous failure. The pathetic army of ineffective spinsters clinging apologetically to the skirts of gentility is conspicuous ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the noisy chicken supper had ended; the table had been cleared; Jim Hastings was tuning his fiddle in the big room; Eve had seated herself before the ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... not very well-devised beginnings. At the fifth Sir Richmond was suddenly conclusive. "It's no use," he said, "I can't fiddle about any more ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... last of its solo performance. It persevered with undiminished ardour; but the Cricket took first fiddle, and kept it. Good Heaven, how it chirped! Its shrill, sharp, piercing voice resounded through the house, and seemed to twinkle in the outer darkness like a star. There was an indescribable little trill and tremble in it at its loudest, which suggested ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... luxuriant foliage, composed a very pleasing image. The manner in which the sod was partially worn under most of them, explained their nightly purpose; or if there could yet be any doubt, the flute and fiddle, pendant in almost every house, spoke ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... accountant, John Tipp. He neither pretended to high blood, nor in good truth cared one fig about the matter. He "thought an accountant the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest accountant in it." Yet John was not without his hobby. The fiddle relieved his vacant hours. He sang, certainly, with other notes than to the Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abominably. His fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle-street, which, without any thing very substantial appended to them, were enough to enlarge ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... As a fiddle and tambourine band were sitting among the company, Quickear suggested why not strike up? 'Ah, la'ads!' said a negro sitting by the door, 'gib the jebblem a darnse. Tak' yah ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... monkeys dangling from their poles, And children whirling in their roundabouts; 695 With those that stretch the neck and strain the eyes, And crack the voice in rivalship, the crowd Inviting; with buffoons against buffoons Grimacing, writhing, screaming,—him who grinds The hurdy-gurdy, at the fiddle weaves, 700 Rattles the salt-box, thumps the kettle-drum, And him who at the trumpet puffs his cheeks, The silver-collared Negro with his timbrel, Equestrians, tumblers, women, girls, and boys, Blue-breeched, pink-vested, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... the doctor says. He's a flapdoodle; nothing but a kind of a sort of a pain. It's all gone now. I'm as fit as a fiddle—and I've got eleven dollars. Let's go ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... way, instead o' doin' as we do, tumblin' in a drop powder, spittin' a ball out your mouth down the muzzle, and hittin' the stock on the pommel of the saddle to send it home. And he had them miserable things—the somethin' 'cussion-caps, and used to fiddle away with them while we were knockin' over the cattle in all directions. Moreover, he had a notion that it was altogether wrong to let go his reins even for a moment, and so, what between the ramrod and the 'cussion-caps and the reins, he was worse than ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... design of a boat, or of a waggon, or of a plough-share, so it controls absolutely the fashioning of tools, and is responsible for any beauty of form they may possess. Of all tools none, of course, is more exquisite than a fiddle-bow. But the fiddle-bow never could have been perfected, because there would have been no call for its tapering delicacy, its calculated balance of lightness and strength, had not the violinist's technique reached such marvellous ...
— Progress and History • Various
... in the pound, Lead up the jolly Round, While Cornet shrill i' th' middle Marches, and merry fiddle, Curtal with deep hum, hum, Cries we come, come, And theorbo loudly answers, Thrum, thrum, thrum, thrum, thrum. But, their fingers frost-nipt, So many notes are o'erslipt, That you'd take sometimes The ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... many qualities unknown to Boiardo; wit, malice, stateliness, decided eloquence and power of simile and apostrophe; he is a symphony for full orchestra, and Boiardo a mere melody played on a single fiddle, which good authorities (and no one dare contest with Italians when they condemn anything not Tuscan as jargon) pronounce to be no Cremona. All these advantages Ariosto certainly has; and I do not quarrel with those who prefer him for them. But many of them distinctly take ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... party a Pole and a Frenchman—both inspectors of revenue for the Turkish government, and splendid fellows—a Belgian, and the writer. We entered a cafe concert, where one man and five or six girls sat in a sort of balcony at one end of the building and played at "fiddle." The main hall was filled with small tables, at which were Greeks, Arabs, Armenians, Turks, and negroes as black as a hole in the night. Between acts the girls were expected to come down, distribute themselves about, and consume beer and other fluid ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... to the whizbangs concert party last night. It was A1—one chap makes his fiddle absolutely speak. He played that Volunteer Organist and parts of Henry VIII., the basso sang 'Will o' the Wisp,' and most of the other songs were old 'uns. I tell you, you wouldn't believe we had such things a couple of miles behind ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... The college refectory is a splendid baronial hall. In the Mitton village-church near by are the tombs of the Sherburne family, the most singular monument being that to Sir Richard and his lady, which the villagers point out as "old Fiddle o' God and his wife"—Fiddle o' God being his customary exclamation when angry, which tradition says was not seldom. The figures are kneeling—he in ruff and jerkin, she in black gown and hood, with tan-leather gloves extending up her arms. These figures, being ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... toes Had once as many as we; When they said, "Some day you may lose them all," He replied, "Fish fiddle de-dee!" And his Aunt Jobiska made him drink Lavender water tinged with pink; For she said, "The World in general knows There's nothing so good for ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... sick!" cried Smallbones. "My sister in Iowa has got a fiddle; an' I know she plays five toons on it—I've heerd her. She's got a mouth organ, too, an' a musical-box—electric! One 'ud think nobody had got nuthin' but Will Henderson." He strode back to the bar in dudgeon, filled to the brim ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... out av doors till I get rid av this cough," he answered. "And ye know I can do a stunt in the band. Don't take giants to fiddle and fife. Little runts can do that. Who do you reckon come ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... night in a disguise, and abuse the women and affront the men whom he met, and sometimes to beat them, and sometimes to be beaten by them. This was one of his imperial nocturnal pleasures; his chiefest in the day was to sing and play upon a fiddle, in the habit of a minstrel, upon the public stage; he was prouder of the garlands that were given to his divine voice (as they called it then) in those kind of prizes, than all his forefathers were of their ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... said the Bailie, "you're welcome to a tune on your ain fiddle; but see if I dinna gar ye dance ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... used to sing—aw, she were always singin'—that fetches Greenhow Hill before my eyes as fair as yon brow across there. And she would learn me to sing bass, an' I was to go to th' chapel wi' 'em where Jesse and she led the singin', th' old man playin' the fiddle. He was a strange chap, old Jesse, fair mad wi' music, an' he made me promise to learn the big fiddle when my arm was better. It belonged to him, and it stood up in a big case alongside o' th' eight-day clock, but Willie Satterthwaite, as played it in the chapel, had getten deaf as a door- post, ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... room. A bow strung with horse-hair was used to play the old-fashioned guitar and before the end of the Middle Ages this six-stringed instrument (the most ancient of all string-instruments which dates back to Egypt and Assyria) had grown into our modern four-stringed fiddle which Stradivarius and the other Italian violin-makers of the eighteenth century brought to the ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... said the doctor. "You two can chat for a while. Don't tire yourself out, young man, and in a day or two you will be fit as a fiddle. Wish I had your physique! That system of yours is a natural shock absorber. We run across them once in a long while—half-killed one day and back the next hunting ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... books, but in life, when you're poor, it's each fellow for himself and there's not any time for your grand sounding self-sacrifice. I wanted it to buy a violin. That thing I've got's nothing but a cheap old fiddle. And I can play—I know I can play, or could if I could get a good violin. I took lessons from an old Belgian who lived above us and I played once for Martini at the theatre and he said—but what's the use of caring? What's the use of thinking about it? All a girl like me can do is just ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... form of pleasure soon wearied him, and he was glad to escape from London in June. He knew the shadowy and intermittent temptation which beckoned him to that house; music had power over him, and he grew conscious of watching Alma Frothingham, her white little chin on the brown fiddle, with too exclusive an interest. When 'that fellow' Cyrus Redgrave, a millionaire, or something of the sort, began to attend these gatherings with a like assiduity, and to win more than his share ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... Hoover discoursed deftly upon the fiddle; at obligates and things he was not much, but at real music he could not be beat. Called his fiddle "Mother," because his own mother was dead, and being he loved her and had no other way of showing it, why, ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... many Negro musicians who were always ready to furnish music from their banjo and fiddle for the frolics. If a white family was entertaining, and needed a musician but didn't own one, they would hire a slave from another plantation to ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... Glad to hear you speak, and sorry I come at an inconvenient time, when you were busy with your music; and—let me see— didn't Mr Mark say something about your wanting the cash to buy a new pianner? Or was it an old fiddle? I quite forget, sir; ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... "that the Church of Christ ought to have no head upon earth, but the monster of many heads, the multitude," and another "that any man may turn away his wife, and take another as oft as he pleases": to which last accusation is added the comment, "As you have most learnedly proved upon the fiddle [Tetrachordon], and practised in your life and conversation; for which you have achieved the honour to be styled the founder of a sect." The audience by this time becoming weary, "a worthy knight ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... yez to-day and to-morrow for a holyday: to-morrow we will have our Gregory;* a fine faste, plinty of poteen, and a fiddle; and you will tell your brothers and sisters to come in the evening to the dance. You must bring plinty of bacon, hung beef, and fowls, bread and cabbage—not forgetting the phaties, and sixpence a-head for the crathur, boys, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... the dingy sofa. He was small and dry, with black eyes and a wrinkled face. He wore a blonde wig which did not match his yellow complexion, and was neatly dressed in black, with an old-fashioned swallow-tail coat of blue. He carried a small fiddle and spoke volubly without regarding the ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... one evening at ould Tom Dundon's wake; an' whatever came betune them, she made no more about it but just draws her cloak round her, and away wid herself and the sarvant-girl home again, as if there was not a corpse, or a fiddle, or a taste of divarsion ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... had been a long time since the merry sound of the fiddle had been heard in the village of Brunen. The throne was surrounded by little boys and girls listening with wondering delight at the gay music. But the grown girls stood afar off and did not look even once ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... of it, Will, there is something else. I never remembered it at the time, but when my old woman was sweeping a cobweb off the rafters the other day she said: 'Why, here is Will's father's fiddle', and, sure enough, there it was. It had been up there from the day you came into the house, and if we noticed it none of us ever gave it ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... post-office on his way down and he had the Boston morning paper in his hand. Of course he was filled to the brim with war news. We discuss little else in Bayport now; even the new baby at the parsonage has to play second fiddle. ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Muse! on thee I call, Pro more, (as do poets all,) To string thy fiddle, wax thy bow, And scrape a ditty, jig, or so. Now don't wax wrathy, but excuse My calling you old Goody Muse; Because "Old Goody" is a name Applied to every college dame. Aloft in pendent dignity, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... the whole year with tomfoolery and fiddle-faddle, only in order to avoid doing the king's service. At the expiration of every period of fifty years they have a jubilee year, and every seventh year is a year of release, during which the land lies fallow, ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... John, "and neat as a fiddle, with the sweetest little baby ways; but I tell you what 'tis," and John's voice fell to a whisper: "he'll maxim her into heaven a heap sight quicker'n he did t'other one; 'case you see she haint so much—what ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... 'Oh, fiddle-de-dee!—every woman, unless she is a fool, knows intuitively what flirtation means, and can put it in practice. But it struck me last night that Aunt Margaret rather encouraged George to pay attention to Gladys. Of course ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... go up that afternoon; so right after school Nora and I started out to the Conservatory. I was very nervous, and my violin is not a very good one; Phil says it's nothing but a fiddle, and that the old second-hand dealer from whom we bought them—Fee has one, too,—cheated us. They certainly do squeak dreadfully, at times, when you least expect it; but then we didn't pay much for them,—you may know that, when we saved for them out ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... features, and clear blue eyes, very beautiful teeth, and a golden beard. His appearance was grave, but not morose, as if he were always examining things and people without condemning them. It was evident that he expected to take the upper hand in general, to play the first fiddle, to hold the top saw, to "be helped to all the stuffing of the pumpkin," as dear Uncle Sam was fond of saying. Of moderate stature, almost of middle age, and dressed nicely, without any gewgaws, which look so common upon a gentleman's ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... to his slumber laid, When the country folks came to serenade; With twang of fiddle, and toot of horn, And shriek of fife, they stayed till morn! Poor Campers! never a wink got they! So they started for home at ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... Protestant. In his youth he had been noted for gallantry, and preserved some traces of it in his address. His grandfather had married a French lady, and although this union had not sensibly diluted the Westcote blood, Endymion would refer to it to palliate a youthful taste for playing the fiddle. He spoke French fluently, with a British accent which, when appointed Commissary, he took pains to improve by conversation with the prisoners, and was fond of discussing heredity with the two most distinguished of them—the Vicomte de Tocqueville ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... brought the wrong book, sir?' chimed in Haymoss, kindly. 'I've knowed music early in life and late,—in short, ever since Luke Sneap broke his new fiddle-bow in the wedding psalm, when Pa'son Wilton brought home his bride (you can mind the time, Sammy?—when we sung "His wife, like a fair fertile vine, her lovely fruit shall bring," when the young woman turned as red as a rose, not ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... you," replied Cabot, suddenly remembering, "I slept splendidly, and am as fit as a fiddle. Have ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... and the curious Do as you would be done by Do what you will but do something all day long Either do not think, or do not love to think Equally forbid insolent contempt, or low envy and jealousy Even where you are sure, seem rather doubtful Every virtue, has its kindred vice or weakness Fiddle-faddle stories, that carry no information along with them Flattery of women Forge accusations against themselves Forgive, but not approve, the bad. Frank, open, and ingenuous exterior, with a prudent interior Gain the affections ...
— Widger's Quotations from Chesterfield's Letters to his Son • David Widger
... duty to him but to stand by and see another doing it? No! a thousand times no! That part, insignificant in itself, and yet often one of the very sweetest and most useful in life's harmonies, familiarly called "second fiddle," was a part impossible to be played by ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... "A fiddle!" exclaimed Donald in accents of withering scorn, and still addressing the fire. "Ye can juist tell him tae gang tae the de'il ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... Burpy. She married a sort of a high-headed man, though one that paid his debts, and was truthful, and considerable good- lookin', and played well on the fiddle. Why, it seemed as if he had almost every qualification for makin' a woman happy, only he had jest this one little excentricity,—that man would lock up Abagail Burpy's clothes every time ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... sing of the carriage that surprised the man from his fiddle and the woman from her tears by its thunder in the ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... Every one in Elmbrook was musically inclined, irrespective of talent. To "play a piece" or sing a solo at a public gathering was the great ambition of every young lady in the place. Masculine performance on any instrument, except a mouth-organ or a fiddle, which last was distinctly worldly, was regarded as rather inclining to effeminacy. But the men all sang, for, of course, it went without saying that every one could sing bass. Tenors were scarce, there being only one at present—a young Englishman who had come out to learn farming at Sandy McQuarry's, ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... or drive cricket balls, dance, run, or stride along roads. Possibly they are soon to lose it. Possibly they look into the eyes of faraway heroes, and take their station among us half contemptuously, she thought (vibrating like a fiddle-string, to be played on and snapped). Anyhow, they love silence, and speak beautifully, each word falling like a disc new cut, not a hubble-bubble of small smooth coins such as girls use; and they move decidedly, as if they knew how long to stay and when to ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... the Senator, strolling up and down, "the things to see in London are the Crystal Palace and the Albert Memorial. Especially the Albert Memorial. That was a man who played second fiddle to his wife, and enjoyed it, all his life long; and there he sits in Hyde Park to-day, I understand, still receiving the respectful homage of the ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... chairs against the walls. And then the captain remarked that it was a cold night, and wouldn't it be a good thing if they were to warm their feet a little? And the next minute there was the sound of Kiah's wooden leg in the passage, and there he was with his fiddle, and the Rogers, all in their Sunday clothes, just behind him. And Patty ran to put down a line of mats, because wooden legs were not good for polished floors. And the captain made Angel such a bow, as if ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... portee' of that company. Points of history, matters of literature, the customs of particular countries, the several orders of knighthood, as Teutonic, Maltese, etc., are surely better subjects of conversation, than the weather, dress, or fiddle-faddle stories, that carry no information along with them. The characters of kings and great men are only to be learned in conversation; for they are never fairly written during their lives. This, therefore, is an entertaining ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... absolute solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world's crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric. Observe, too, how the drying process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a violin. Here is a Tyrolese fiddle that is just coming to its hundredth birthday,—(Pedro Klauss, Tyroli, fecit, 1760,)—the sap is pretty well out of it. And here is the song of an old poet ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... taught him, but into which he had introduced some amusing variations of his own. The other children joined in the choruses; and then Jim danced breakdowns, "walk-along-Joes," and other darky dances, his master accompanying him on a cracked fiddle, till my sides were sore with laughter, and the hostess begged them to stop. Finally the clock struck twelve, and the farmer, going to the door, gave a long, loud blast on a cow's horn. In about five minutes one after another ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... spinning-wheels. After the work was done, it was usual to have a festival. The young men wrestled and showed their prowess at trials of strength; the rest looked on and applauded. In the evening there was a dance, at which the local musician scraped out tuneless tunes on an ancient fiddle; and there was of course hearty eating and, it is to be ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... on to, Julius Benjamin. The bridge is gone. So's everything else. It's only a matter of time when Goggles will be gone, too. This last will fix him with the company." Zephyr glanced slyly at Bennie with the last words. "The jig is up. The fiddle's broke its last string, ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... virtue of patience, and give us something of the spirit of the old masters who in dingy shops ceased not from labor, and kept their cheerful serenity to the end, though the outcome was only the most perfect fiddle, or a deathless head. But they themselves had the souls of artists, and were honest men, who in their work found joy and freedom, and therefore what they did remains as a source of delight and inspiration. If we find it impossible to put our hearts into ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... stirring," said Adrian, "not even a mouse. Sellers—oh, what men daily do, not knowing what they do!—is shut up in the scullery, I suppose, torturing his poor defenceless fiddle. That 's what it is to be a musical boot-and-knife boy. And Wickersmith will be at his devotions. He tells me he never gets leisure for his morning meditation till luncheon 's cleared away. And that's what it is to be a pious butler. I 'm doubting whether ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... the learned air of the region in which he had his chambers. In other respects, he was one of the wits of the place, read Ovid and Martial, aimed at quick repartee and pun, (often very far fetched,) danced, fenced, played at tennis, and performed sundry tunes on the fiddle and French horn, to the great annoyance of old Counsellor Barratter, who lived in the chambers immediately below him. Such was Reginald Lowes-toffe, shrewd, alert, and well-acquainted with the town through all its recesses, but in a sort of disrespectable way. This gallant, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... would contradict her. You puff and blow like a seal when you come upstairs; your paunch rises and falls like the diamond on a woman's forehead! It is pretty plain that you served in the dragoons; you are a very ugly-looking old man. Fiddle-de-dee. If you have any mind to keep my respect, I recommend you not to add imbecility to these qualities by imagining that such a girl as I am will be content with your asthmatic love, and not look for youth and good looks and pleasure by ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... he said, "I hope you have not been led into buying any instrument by a faith in its antiquity. So many good copies of instruments by famous makers and bearing their labels are now afloat, that the chances of obtaining a genuine fiddle from an unrecognised source are quite remote; of hundreds of violins submitted to me for opinion, I find that scarce one in fifty is actually that which it represents itself to be. In fact the only safe rule," he added as a professional ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... blasphemy, they propose to draw it, and not draw it mild. The daily prints will doubtless follow their example. No more Jenkinsisms in the Morning Post, concerning fashionable parties. A view of the duchess's ball-room, or of the dining-table of the earl, will supersede all occasion for lengthy fiddle-faddle. The opera of the night before will be described in a vignette—the ballet in a tail-piece; and we shall know at a glance whether Cerito and Elssler performed their pas meritoriously, by the number of bouquets depicted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... black shawls, and the men in their round Breton hats with buckles and streaming ribbons, while knots began to collect about the doors of the village cafes, and laughter, gossip and the sound of the fiddle arose on the sunny air, Geoffroi would gather a circle round him to hear his quips and odd stories, and to join in the fun that he would mercilessly make of others less quick than himself at repartee. It ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... fiddler is the pride O' chaps an' maidens vur an' wide; They can't keep up a merry tide, But Bob is in the middle. If merry Bob do come avore ye, He'll zing a zong, or tell a story; But if you'd zee en in his glory, Jist let en have a fiddle. ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... the same spot. 'I remember there were poles pushed out of upper windows on which clothes were drying, and I remember a low public-house, and the sound flowing down a narrow passage belonging to it of the scraping of a fiddle and the shuffling of feet. But here are all these things in the lane, and here are all these things in the alley. And I have nothing else in my mind but a wall, a dark doorway, a flight of stairs, and ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... an hour had scarcely passed as they were playing, when a poor old man, who had a fiddle, came into ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... Camille Desmoulins, Who with a hundred other of his ilk Hissed on the hounds and smeared his bread with blood; Lebon, man-fiend, that vampire-ghoul who drank Hot blood of headless victims, and compelled Mothers to view the murder of their babes; At whose red guillotine, in Arras raised, The pipe and fiddle played at every fall Of ghastly head the ribald "Ca Ira;" And fiends unnamed ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... good enough to play or sing it? An embarrassing request, for musical talent was not conspicuous in the delegation; but Peter, Gallatin's black servant, rose to the occasion. He whistled the air; and then one of the attaches scraped out the melody on a fiddle, so that the quick-witted orchestra speedily composed l'air national des Americains a grand orchestre, and thereafter always played it as a counterbalance ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... niaiserie^; inanity; flap-doodle; rigmarole, rodomontade; truism; nugae canorae [Lat.]; twaddle, twattle, fudge, trash, garbage, humbug; poppy-cock [U.S.]; stuff, stuff and nonsense; bosh, rubbish, moonshine, wish-wash, fiddle- faddle; absurdity &c 497; vagueness &c (unintelligibility) 519. [routine or reflexive statements without substantive thought, esp. legal] boilerplate, clich. V. mean nothing; be unmeaning &c adj.; twaddle, quibble, scrabble. Adj. unmeaning; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... are a born artist and musician. Music, tone, sound, colour, vibrate in every page of your romances. Had your parents taught you harmony, the piano, and the fiddle, your music would have burst forth along its normal lines. As they merely taught you the alphabet and grammar, your creative faculty turned to literature; you wrote romances full of music, instead of composing music full of romance. It is a distinction without a difference. ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... wench, I cannot court thy sprightly eyes, With the base-viol plac'd between my thighs; I cannot lisp, nor to some fiddle sing, Nor run upon a high-stretch'd minikin; I cannot whine in puling elegies, Entombing Cupid with sad obsequies; I am not fashion'd for these amorous times, To court thy beauty with lascivious rhymes; I cannot dally, caper, dance, and sing, Oiling ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... his subordinate, the lieutenant; it being the custom of the service for the commander to "carry on" on such occasions and the officer of the watch, whoever he might be, to "play second fiddle," as the saying goes, which part the "first luff," took in the present instance, proceeding at once to his ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Hear the noise his fiddle is making, and he is scolding the poor little wretches like ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... whether they are really bad or not, time alone can tell. At present we are admiring plain silver and are perhaps exacting that it be too plain? The only safe measure of what is good, is to choose that which has best endured. The "King" and the "Fiddle" pattern for flat silver, have both been in use in houses of highest fashion ever since they were designed, so that they, among others, must have merit to ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... something and passed on. In the first place, she was not quite so eager as was Miss Ruff; and in the next, Miss Ruff was neither the partner nor the opponent with whom she delighted to co-operate. Lady Longspade liked to play first-fiddle at her own table; but Miss Ruff always played first-fiddle at her table, let the others be whom they might; and she very generally played her tunes altogether ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... were shown the scene of one of these neighborhood vengeances. It is a low house at the side of a ravine, down whose steep slope the beech forest steps persistently erect, as if distrusting gravitation. Thirty Confederates had gathered in that house at a country-side frolic, and the fiddle sang deep in the night. The mountain girls are very pretty, having dark, opalescent eyes, with a touch of gold in them at a side glance, slight, rather too fragile figures, and the singular purity of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... Hudibras his passing worth, The manner how he sallied forth; His arms and equipage are shown; His horse's virtues, and his own. Th' adventure of the bear and fiddle Is sung, but breaks off in the ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... gardens, and the sloping lawns blazed with flowers. My mother said it was much prettier than Kaskaskia; not crowded with traffic; not overrun with foreigners. Everybody seemed to be making a fete, to be visiting or receiving visits. At sunset the fiddle and the banjo began their melody. The young girls would gather at Barbeau's or Le Compt's or Pensonneau's—at any one of a dozen places, and the young men would follow. It was no trouble to have a dance every evening, and on feast days and great days there were balls, of course. The violin ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... say they used to have breakdowns in slave time—breakdown dances with fiddle and banjo music. Far after slavery, they had them. The only other amusement worth speaking about was the churches. Far as the churches was concerned, they had to steal out and go to them. Old man Balm Whitlow can tell you all about the way they held church. They would slip off in the ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... was plaintive, and she could not conceal it. Glory as she might in the role of second fiddle, she was very tenaciously aware of what was due to that subservient but by no means insignificant performer; and the Aspreys had not shown themselves enough aware, Mercedes had not shown herself aware at all, of what they all owed to her sustaining, discreet and harmonious ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... candles, and lighted in his presence; saying, that the Europeans knew every thing. Their only musical instruments are two, one of which they have from the Moors, which is like a large drum[5]; the other is somewhat like a fiddle, having only two strings, which they play on with their fingers, but gives no sounds ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... had a right to want was a good husband. She was quite satisfied with her own lot in that respect, but she was anxious enough on behalf of Kate. And when a young man did come, who might make matters so pleasant for them, Harry quarreled with him because he was a free-selector. "A free fiddle-stick!" she had once said to Kate—not, however, communicating to her innocent sister the ambition which was already filling her own bosom. "Harry does take things up so—as though people weren't to live, some in one way and some in another! As far as I can see, Mr. Medlicot is a very ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... the crossing, we were astonished to see a man seated in a sulky in the middle of the river and playing for his life on a fiddle. The horse was up to his middle in water, and it seemed as if the flimsy vehicle was ready to be swept away by the current. Still the fiddler fiddled on composedly as if his life had been ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... take little advantage by what was come and gane. And, indeed, my gudesire, of his ain accord, lang forswore baith the pipes and the brandy—it was not even till the year was out, and the fatal day past, that he would so much as take the fiddle or drink ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... Sally's face assumed, convinced Uncle Peter that he had failed in his attempts at speaking grammatically, and with a sudden determination never again to try, he precipitately left the house, and for the next two hours amused himself by playing "Bruce's Address" upon his old cracked fiddle. From that time Sal gave up all hopes of educating Uncle Peter, and confined herself mostly to literary efforts, of which ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... violins, and ran himself into debt because he bought so many and such good ones. Once, when visiting his father's house at Ipsden, he shocked the punctilious old gentleman by dancing on the dining-table to the accompaniment of a fiddle, which he scraped delightedly. Dancing, indeed, was another of his diversions, and, in spite of the fact that he was a fellow of Magdalen and a D.C.L. of Oxford, he was always ready to caper and to display the ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... between Frohman and Stoddart, who, in a way, was a character. He played the violin, and when business was bad and the company got in the dumps Stoddart added to their misfortunes by playing doleful tunes on his fiddle. But that fiddle had a virtue not to be despised, because it was Stoddart's bank. In its hollow box he secreted his modest savings, and in more than one emergency they were drawn on for company bed and board. When the organization reached Memphis Charles had so completely won the ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... a take-down for the bleeder, ain't it, 'avin' to play second fiddle,' said Philpot with a ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... told herself. "Ruth's black brows have walked straight into his affections! I might as well resign myself to play second fiddle forthwith." ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... at his own game? There was no manner of doubt that angels would at least have walked delicately where we had rushed in. However, it was too late now. Even if we would, we could not draw back. Beyond doing what we could to keep him as fit as a fiddle, there ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... song from Figaro—encored; the madrigal, 'Down in a Flowery Vale'—the latter always a sure card; a duet from Semiramide, by two young ladies—rather shaky; solo on the clarionet, by a gentleman who makes the instrument sound like a fiddle—great applause; 'In manly Worth,' by an oratorio tenor; the overture to Masaniello, by the band; concerto (posthumous, Beethoven), by a stern classical man—audience yawn; pot pourri, by a romantic ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... his demonstrator came in to ask a question about a codfish. "Codfish?" said Huxley; "that's a vertebrate, isn't it? Ask me in a fortnight and I'll consider it." While at work he smoked almost continuously, and from time to time he took a little relaxation, for the strains of a fiddle were occasionally heard from his room. Indeed he was devoted to music, regarding it as one of the highest of the aesthetic pleasures. He tells ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... the place was ablaze with light. Big oil lamps by the score, backed by polished reflectors, illumined the interior. From within came the strains of guitars and the gay scrapings of a fiddle, mingled with the hum of Spanish voices, an occasional oath in English, and the ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... asked a guide, he observed that he had no doubt but the old man who was with Capt. C. would accompany us if we wished him and that he was better informed of the country than any of them. matters being thus far arranged I directed the fiddle to be played and the party danced very merily much to the amusement and gratification of the natives, though I must confess that the state of my own mind at this moment did not well accord with the prevailing mirth as I somewhat feared that the ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... such a lovely sting-nettle for Miss Fennimore's peacock caterpillar; and when I heard how kind dear Juliana was to you about your visit to London, I thought she really must have it for a reward; so I ran away, and slily tucked it into her bouquet; and I did so hope she would take it up to fiddle with when the gentlemen talk to her,' said the elf, with an irresistibly comic imitation ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt Mawmets ( puppets) Mawmett ( Mahomet) Meath (A curious corruption of Mentz. Old printers distorted foreign names in an extraordinary manner.) Mechall Mention ( dimension) Mew Middleton, quotation from his Family of Love Minikin ( fiddle) Mistris Moe Monthes mind Mooncalf More hayre than wit Morglay Mosch Mother Motion ( suggestion, proposal) Mouse Much (ironical) Mumchance Muscadine Muschatoes ( moustaches) Mushrumps ( mushrooms) Music played between the acts Muskadine with an egg My Love can ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... noise and hubbub was Carlisle city that day; yet, as the two entered the courtyard of the castle, James was aware of another sound, rising clear above the tumult of the town—strains of music, surely, that came from a fiddle. As they stepped under the inner gateway and approached the Norman Keep, the fiddler himself came in sight playing with might and main, under a barred window about six feet from the ground. By the fiddler's side, urging ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... threat of rivalry; even more easily he slipped into the same way of regarding Mary Arkroyd, helped thereto by a lingering feeling that, after all and in spite of all, when it came to really serious cases, a woman could not, at best, play more than second fiddle. So, as has been seen, he patronized and encouraged Mary; he told himself that, when she had thoroughly proved her capacity—within the limits which he ascribed to it—to take her into partnership would not be ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... larky; Just look at my glow and examine my arc! Fwizz! How's that for high, and for vivid and sparky! I obviate dirt, and I dissipate dark. You just let me in; the result you'll be charmed at. Objections, Old Boy, are all fiddle-de-dee. Come now! I'm sure you cannot be alarmed at A dear little chap ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 29, 1891 • Various
... neighbor, there is a great deal of dancing going on. Here and there a ring is formed, carved out, as it were, from the solid mass of human beings, in which some half dozen couples are revolving more or less in time to the braying of a bagpipe or scraping of a fiddle, executing something which has more or less semblance to a waltz. The mode in which these rings are formed is at once simple and efficacious. Any couple who feel disposed to dance link themselves together and begin to bump themselves against their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... forwards,—and pointing with his right hand open towards a map of Dunkirk, which was pinned against the hangings,—I think, quoth Corporal Trim, with humble submission to your Honour's better judgment,—that these ravelins, bastions, curtins, and hornworks, make but a poor, contemptible, fiddle-faddle piece of work of it here upon paper, compared to what your Honour and I could make of it were we in the country by ourselves, and had but a rood, or a rood and a half of ground to do what we pleased with: As summer is coming on, continued Trim, your Honour might sit out of ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... people.[3] Ritson in his "Ancient Songs" admits that such an "order" of singers existed in France, but never in England; that individuals wandered up and down the country chanting romances and singing songs or ballads to the harp or fiddle; but that they never enjoyed the respect of the high born or received favors from them. The church evidently looked upon them with disfavor, as the enemies of sobriety and the promoters of revelry and mirth. In the sixteenth century they lost all credit and were classed, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... should we meddle With diddle daddle, fiddle faddle; We shall lose the Girls that please; Go to ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... Wells, and had never opened a book since, except his prayer book on Sundays, and then he could scarcely spell out the verse of the psalms, and shouted Tate and Brady to the accompaniment of scraping fiddle and trombone in the gallery of the church, with a refreshing disregard of words, though he supplied deficiencies by mystic utterances which filled in doubtful passages and could be interpreted according to ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... are not my best, only very ordinary and humdrum affairs—but ex pede Herculem! Hon'ble Sir, and you will see how transcendentally superior are even such poor effusions compared to the fiddle-faddle and gim-crack style of article with which you are being fobbed off ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... sing a song, and most of his ditties were either of the old days of the Red River Valley, or dealt with the early settlers round the Citadel of Quebec. Amongst the accomplishments which he possessed was that of scraping out woful strains upon an ancient fiddle. In this land, where life was always serious, he was a right jovial companion for such men as Nick and Ralph, and the merry evenings in his company at the store ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... a groupe suited to Teniers, a cluster of out-of-door customers of the Rose, old benchers of the inn, who sit round a table smoking and drinking in high solemnity to the sound of Timothy's fiddle. Next, a mass of eager boys, the combatants of Monday, who are surrounding the shoemaker's shop, where an invisible hole in their ball is mending by Master Keep himself, under the joint superintendence ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... more earnestly than now. He felt that the Lord had this night a special work for him to do. Tonight Eric Hermannson, the wildest lad on all the Divide, sat in his audience with a fiddle on his knee, just as he had dropped in on his way to play for some dance. The violin is an object of particular abhorrence to the Free Gospellers. Their antagonism to the church organ is bitter enough, but the fiddle they regard as a very incarnation of evil desires, singing forever ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... but he hasn't pluck to act up to it. He's not even told one of his fine friends what his brother does; he says it's for the sake of his school. He's living a lie for his own pride. He's got himself made master of a college, fine as a fiddle, and he cares more about that than about his brother. With all his prayers and his sermons in church every Sunday, he'd let me go to the dogs rather than live out the truth. He thinks I've gone to the devil now, because I left him in a rage, and I told him I'd go and ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... hurried on. A few hundred yards more, and she would be clear of that awesome Bedlam. She had to pass between some, huts, one of which she could see was in flames. Hard by she could hear the sound of a fiddle, and the excited whoops of dancers. The Red River jig was evidently in full blast. She turned the corner of a corral and came full on it. Several people were standing apart round a bare spot of ground. A capering half-breed, with great red stockings reaching above his knees, with blanket suit, ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... a deeper color on his face, and that he clinched both his fists and—thrust them into his pockets. That set her thinking, and the more she thought, the more curious she grew. He played the violin well; suppose she should ask him to come and fiddle at the party her father was to give at the end of the harvest. She resolved to do it, and he, not knowing what moved her, gave his promise eagerly. It struck her, afterward, that she had done a wicked thing, but, like most girls, she had not the ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... itself is untranslatable. It has that inexpressible cadence and inflection of the Norse dialect which you feel (if you have the conditions for recognizing it) in the first word a Norseman addresses to you. It has that wonderful twang of the Hardanger fiddle, and the color and sentiment of the ballads sung and the legendary tales recited around the hearth in a Norwegian homestead during the long winter nights. With Bjoernson it was in the blood. It was his soul's accent, the dialect of his thought, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... heard of famous Neil, The man who play'd the fiddle weel; He was a heartsome merry chiel', And weel he lo'ed the whisky, O! For e'er since he wore the tartan hose He dearly liket Athole brose![63] And grieved he was, you may suppose, To ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... with others and at the same time out of debt, she has the right to hope that by and by she will be so good an actress, and so valuable to the theatre, that a fat salary will make the clothes matter play second fiddle, as is right and proper it should, to the question ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... compares Socrates to the gallipots of the Athenian apothecaries; the grotesque figures of owls and apes were painted on their exterior, but they contained within precious balsams. The man of genius amidst many a circle may exclaim with Themistocles, "I cannot fiddle, but I can make a little village a great city;" and with Corneille, he may be allowed to smile at his own deficiencies, and even disdain to please in certain conventional manners, asserting that "wanting all these things, he ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... understand. He learns to dance and to fence, by the masters of those noble sciences. He becomes a compleat connoisseur in dressing hair, and in adorning his own person, under the hands and instructions of his barber and valet de chambre. If he learns to play upon the flute or the fiddle, he is altogether irresistible. But he piques himself upon being polished above the natives of any other country by his conversation with the fair sex. In the course of this communication, with which he is indulged from ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... order, the first week commonly passes in reconnoitring, cool civilities, and cautious concessions, to yield at length to the never-dying charities; unless, indeed, the latter may happen to be kept in abeyance by a downright quarrel, about midnight carousals, a squeaking fiddle, or some incorrigible snorer. ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... asthma. I'm as fit as a fiddle. Doctors tell me to watch my blood pressure and cut off my toddies. Remember? I used ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... Maude, but this is a very old-fashioned and a very simple entertainment I'm going to give. Just the things that I play to myself when I'm weary of listening to humanity tell of its ills and aches—the egotist! Then I look down into the beautifully clean inside of my fiddle, its good old mechanism without a flaw, and listen to the things it has to tell.... Thank you, just the same, Miss Maude; this is not a theme worthy of your brilliant rendition, but, as I said, a simple, old-fashioned playing of the fiddle. I'll ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... better than you can tell me, Tony, but 'tis such an easy way to get a living; I could enjoy such glorious indolence; could fish, and hunt, and shoot, and play the fiddle, and attend feasts and merry-makings, with such a happy consciousness of being found in the path of duty, that it would give a double zest to enjoyment. Now don't be envious, my dear demure cousin, and forestall me in my project. I am sure to gain my father's consent. It will save ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... happy fields we till, And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead, And the wise men seeking out marvels and the poet's teaming head. And the painter's hand of wonder, and the marvellous fiddle-bow, And the banded choirs of music—all those that do and know. For all these shall be ours and all men's, nor shall any lack a share Of the toil and the gain of living in the days when the world ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... 'Royal Edinburgh,' and enjoyed once more the restful calm of a quasi-tropical night, broken only by the Christmas twanging of the machete (which is to the guitar what kit is to fiddle); by the clicking of the pebbles on the shore, and by the gentle murmuring of the ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... not my best, only very ordinary and humdrum affairs—but ex pede Herculem! Hon'ble Sir, and you will see how transcendentally superior are even such poor effusions compared to the fiddle-faddle and gim-crack style of article with which you are being fobbed off ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... emotions of the sublime was when he stood upon one of the summits of the Cordillera, and surveyed the magnificent prospect all around. It seemed, as he quaintly observed, as if his nerves had become fiddle strings, and had all taken to rapidly vibrating. This remark was only made incidentally, and the conversation passed into some other branch. About an hour afterwards Mr. Darwin retired to rest, while I sat up in the smoking-room ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... arrangement. The kitchen, however, besides being the warmest, was by far the gayest place. Here we watched our dinner cooked, and ate it afterwards; heard of wars and rumours of wars; listened to heroic ballads, chanted by a warrior, and accompanied by a species of one-stringed fiddle; and made the acquaintance of two very fashionable young men. One was the bishop's nephew, a handsome lad about seventeen, who was, on account of his youth, very shy and modest, and acted as cavaliero ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... as a souvenir of the occasion. Thereupon, Lola, always anxious to oblige, struck a bargain with him. "I have," she said, "a pet grizzly in my orchard. If you will wrestle with him for three minutes, you shall have enough of my hair to make a bow for your fiddle. Let me see what you can do." The challenge was accepted; and the amorous violinist, merely stipulating that the animal should be muzzled, set to work and secured ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... or seated at numerous small tables, men were drinking villainous liquor, smoking and talking, and paying but scant attention to the strains of the fiddle or the accordion, save when some well known air was played, when all would join in a boisterous chorus. Some were always passing in or out of a door which led into a room behind. Here there was comparative quiet, for men were gambling, ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... Weavers of Toulon " Wheelwrights of Paris Banquet, Grand, at the Court of France Barber Barnacle Geese Barrister, Fifteenth Century Basin-maker Bastille, The Bears and other Beasts, how they may be caught with a Dart Beggar playing the Fiddle Beheading Bell and Canon Caster Bird-catching, Fourteenth Century Bird-piping, Fourteenth Century Blind and Poor Sick of St. John, Fifteenth Century Bob Apple, The Game of Bootmaker's Apprentice working ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... a close:—the mouths in the boudoir are assuming the shape of elongated O's—an epidemic that has extended to the Wall-flowers; the "harp" has accompanied his instrument with fitful snores; the "violin" scarcely knows the back from the front of his fiddle, or the "cornet" which end to blow into;—yet, upon being asked for "Roger de Coverley," they make a desperate effort to awake, for they know it to be the last dance—which is supported by the whole strength of the company,—Captain de ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... a fiddle, a clarionet, and a flageolet from the Blind Asylum. The three were paid seven francs in a lump sum for the night. For the money, they gave us, not Beethoven certainly, nor yet Rossini; they played as they had the will and the skill; and every one in the room (with ...
— Facino Cane • Honore de Balzac
... a splendid baronial hall. In the Mitton village-church near by are the tombs of the Sherburne family, the most singular monument being that to Sir Richard and his lady, which the villagers point out as "old Fiddle o' God and his wife"—Fiddle o' God being his customary exclamation when angry, which tradition says was not seldom. The figures are kneeling—he in ruff and jerkin, she in black gown and hood, with tan-leather gloves extending up her arms. These figures, being highly colored, ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... Heroes and Peace Seem'd to smile at the sound of the fiddle, Proud to fill up each tall shining space Round the lanthorn[1] that stood in the middle. And GEORGE'S head too; Heav'n screen him! May he finish in peace his long reign! And what did we when we had seen him? Why—went ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... at her; even Johnny Whitelamb looked, with a face as long as a fiddle. The comment was quiet, but the note of scorn in it could not be mistaken. Molly in revolt! Molly, of all persons! Molly sat trembling. She knew that among them all Johnny was her one ally—and a hopelessly ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... years ago, at Skansen—the great park just outside of Stockholm where they have collected so many wonderful things—there lived a little old man, named Clement Larsson. He was from Haelsingland and had come to Skansen with his fiddle to play folk dances and other old melodies. As a performer, he appeared mostly in the evening. During the day it was his business to sit on guard in one of the many pretty peasant cottages which have been moved to Skansen from all parts of ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... the list? My initiation into music took place in the following manner. We had a dancing-master who came regularly to Mr. Cape's house to prepare us to shine in society, and his instrument was the convenient dancing-master's pocket fiddle or kit. Although this instrument gives forth but a feeble kind of music, I was far more enchanted with it than by the dancing, and wrote a most persuasive letter to my good guardian imploring her to let me study the violin. Those were the happy times when one had energy for everything! I had ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... lighted; two sheep were killed, and the cuscasoe was preparing, when the ladies arrived. The music consisted of an instrument similar to a flageolet, (tabla) a kettle-drum, and a sort of castanets of steel, an erbeb, or fiddle with two strings, played with a semicircular bow. The tunes 141 were gay and sprightly, and the damsels tripped along on the light fantastic toe in a very superior and elegant style. They danced without men; advancing gently at ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... downstairs. By-and-by, as she sat knitting, she heard Monsieur's fiddle as he played over a ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... below the bend; the half-breeds sauntered about, flashing bright teeth and wicked dark eyes at whom it might concern; the traders gazed stolidily over their little black pipes, and uttered brief sentences through their thick black beards. Everywhere was gay sound—the fiddle, the laugh, the song; everywhere was gay color—the red sashes of the voyageurs, the beaded moccasins and leggings of the metis, the capotes of the brigade, the variegated costumes of the ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... upon this discourse he said if ever there was another Dutch war they should not find a Secretary; "Nor," said I, "a Clerk of the Acts, for I see the reward of it; and, thank God, I have enough of my own to buy me a book and a good fiddle, and I have a good wife;"—"Why," says he, "I have enough to buy me a good book, and shall not need a fiddle because I have never a one of your good wives." This morning the House is upon a Bill, brought in to-day by Sir Richard Temple, for obliging the King to call Parliaments ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... gazed, two Bosnian minstrels, from bad memory and an indifferent ear, began playing on a fiddle and a guitar, and though their music was atrocious, the wild Turkish songs which they sang gave the finishing touch to the scene. It was not till they began playing snatches of music-hall airs, such long-forgotten tunes as "Daisy," that ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... dance contra dances. None of these new jigs and not wear any clothes to speak of. We covered our hides in those days; no tight skirts like now. You could take three or four steps inside our skirts and then not reach the edge. One of the boys would fiddle awhile and then someone would spell him and he could get a dance. Sometimes they would ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... The bugle, the violin, the fife and drum, furnished all the musical entertainments. These were much used and passionately admired. Weddings, military trainings, house-raisings, chopping frolics, were often followed with the fiddle, ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... Augustus Holyoke, of Salem, who died in 1829, aged one hundred and one years. It was recalled by an old lady that the scholars in the school of her youth marched through Boston streets, to the music of the fiddle played by "Black Henry," to Concert Hall, corner Tremont and Bromfield streets, to practice dancing; and that Mr. Turner walked at the head of the school. His advertisements may be seen in Boston ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... Kokem lay snoozing upon his brass bed— Oh, play an old tune on your fiddle! With shoes on his feet, and a crown on his head— Oh, tune ...
— The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes • Leroy F. Jackson
... for the dance the shepherd dressed, In ribbons, wreath, and gayest vest Himself with care arraying: Around the linden lass and lad Already footed it like mad: Hurrah! hurrah! Hurrah—tarara-la! The fiddle-bow was playing. ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... ungovernable, impenitent, or self-sufficient, especially Taberner, Phipps, and Church, who, as I am informed, have, in violation of my sub-dean's and chapter's order in December last, at the instance of some obscure persons unknown, presumed to sing and fiddle at the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... Indians—to weave their own clothes, make rugs, tan leather, grow straw for hats,—all of which they do to this day, so that you may enter a habitant house and not find a single article except saints' images, a holy book, and perhaps a fiddle, which the habitant has not himself made. "The Jesuits assume too much authority," wrote the King. Talon lessened their power by inviting the Recollets to come back to Canada and by encouraging the Sulpicians. Instead of outlawing young Frenchmen for deserting to the English, Talon ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... is not much that I can do, For I've no money that's quite my own!" Spoke up the pitying child - A little boy with a violin At the station before the train came in, - "But I can play my fiddle to you, And a nice one 'tis, ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... some vary long spich," went on the orator, "as I know dat you all rather have de dance. Den I see, too, dat my friend Magloire Meloche, down dare, he look many time at de fiddle he brought and hang on de wall." This bantering allusion to the veteran fiddle-player of the district caused a hearty outburst of ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... for the most part. I might have had their names on my bills as long as their fingers could hold a pen, but slit me if I like bleeding my own companions. They might have found a place for me, too, had I consented to play second-fiddle where I had been used to lead the band. I' faith, I care not what I turn my hand to amongst strangers, but I would fain leave ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... is not he in Parliament? and then they could not take him up. They never could arrest Charles Fox. I have known him in as much trouble as anyone. Once he sent all his furniture to my house from his lodgings. He lodged in Bury-street. I always look at the house when I pass by. Don't fiddle the pens; I hate people who fiddle. Where is Gregory? where is my bell' Where is the page? Naughty boy! why do not you come? There, I do not want anything; I do not know what to do. The wicked men! The greatest favourite I had: he ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... a smile, "that's only the name the fellows gave to Sid Wilton. He plays second fiddle to Shanks. He's always at his beck and call, and ready to fetch and carry for him. He jumps through the hoop and rolls over and plays dead whenever ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... that went by that name, was furnished by two cowboys with banjos and an antediluvian gentleman with a fiddle. Nevertheless, it was music that could be danced to, and there ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... toys too were a great attraction. You dropped a penny into a little slit in a box and a doll would begin to dance and play the fiddle: and there was the Magic Mill, where for another modest copper a row of tiny figures, wrinkled and old and dressed in the shabbiest of rags, marched in weary procession up a flight of steps into the Mill, only to emerge again the next moment at a further door of this wonderful building looking young ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... a mighty leap that caught Shorty unawares and sent him into a crumpled heap in the sand. Dade's riata, tight as a fiddle-string at first, slackened as the buckskin, his breath coming in snorts, surged alongside. Jack leaned again—this time to snatch the ivory-handled revolver from the holster on Dade's saddle. As well as he could ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... to act up to it. He's not even told one of his fine friends what his brother does; he says it's for the sake of his school. He's living a lie for his own pride. He's got himself made master of a college, fine as a fiddle, and he cares more about that than about his brother. With all his prayers and his sermons in church every Sunday, he'd let me go to the dogs rather than live out the truth. He thinks I've gone to the devil now, because I left him in a rage, and I told him I'd go and learn ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... extremely poor, landlocked country, highly dependent on farming (wheat especially) and livestock raising (sheep and goats). Economic considerations have played second fiddle to political and military upheavals during more than 16 years of war, including the nearly 10-year Soviet military occupation (which ended 15 February 1989). Over the past decade, one-third of the population fled the ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Gaston brought his fiddle along, and those were wonderful tunes he drew from the strings. Sometimes he explained what they meant, his words running along in monotone that yet kept time to ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... and sliding about, but regular warm work, flying into corners, and diving among chairs, and shooting out at the door,—something like dancing! Signor Billsmethi in particular, notwithstanding his having a little fiddle to play all the time, was out on the landing every figure, and Master Billsmethi, when everybody else was breathless, danced a hornpipe, with a cane in his hand, and a cheese-plate on his head, to the unqualified admiration of the whole company. Then, Signor Billsmethi insisted, as they were so happy, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... said he wasn't going to play second fiddle to your crowd any longer. He tried to get into a quarrel with Ben, but Ben would have nothing ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... may. I'm feeling like a new fiddle—barring a bruise at the back of my head, which makes a 'hard hat' a burden. I may as well tell you first off that Mrs. McFarlane is the wife of the Forest Supervisor at Bear Tooth, and Miss Berea is the able assistant of her father. We are ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... last there rose a cry—Newport! The sleepers started to their feet. I started to mine, but I discreetly and quietly sat down again. Was it Newport, at last? Not at all. The harbor lights were gleaming from afar; and the cry was of the bandmaster shouting to his emissaries, arousing fiddle and flute and bassoon to their deceitful duty. They had played us out of port—they would play us in again. They had promised us that all should go merry as a marriage-bell, and—I would not be understood to complain, but it had ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... obtained his livelihood by giving lessons on the flute, on the guitar, and in teaching French during the day, and at night was engaged as second violin in the orchestra of the Opera House; so that he had many strings to his bow, besides those of his fiddle. His wife, a pretty little lively woman, taught young ladies to make flowers in wax, and mended lace in the evenings. They were a very amiable and amusing couple, always at good-natured warfare with each other, and sparring ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... the unseen musician, "you are spoiling your fiddle and breaking your promise. You said you wouldn't be silly. Go to bed now like ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... August. You go to them. You smoke your cigar or cigarette (and I regret to say that you strike your matches during the soft bars of the "Lohengrin" overture), and you enjoy the music. But you say you cannot play the piano or the fiddle, or even the banjo; that ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... colour changed in anxious faces when some greater billow struck the barrack, and its pillars quivered and sprang under the blow. It was then that the foreman builder, Mr. Goodwillie, whom I see before me still in his rock-habit of undecipherable rags, would get his fiddle down and strike up human minstrelsy amid the music of the storm. But it was in sunshine only that I saw Dhu-Heartach; and it was in sunshine, or the yet lovelier summer afterglow, that the steamer would return to Earraid, ploughing an enchanted sea; the obedient ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lever have at his beddes heed [rather] Twenty bokes, clad in blak or reed, Of Aristotle and his philosophye, Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrye [fiddle, psaltery]. But al be that he was a philosophre, Yet hadde he but liter gold in cofre; But al that he mighte of his freendes hente [get], On bokes and on lerninge he it spente, And bisily gan for the soules preye Of hem that yaf him wherewith to scoleye [gave, study]. Of studie took ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... their navigation. The bargemen were at once the envy and terror of the simple folk along the shores. A wild, turbulent class, ready to fight and to dance, equally enraptured with the rough scraping of a fiddle by one of their number, or the sound of the war-whoop, which promised the only less joyous diversion of a fight, they aroused all the inborn vagrant tendencies of the riverside boys, and to run away with a flatboat became, for the Ohio or Indiana lad, as much of an ambition as to run ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... to Fancy's fiddle, Hands across and down the middle— Life's perhaps the only riddle That we shrink ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... was black. His great shoe-buckles glistened. His fur cuffs ended in a sheen of rings. And underneath his coat a case bulged blackly — He swept his beaver in a rush of wings! Then took the fiddle out, and, as I listened, Tightened and tuned the ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... hall a crowd, No more the music thunders loud, Some a mazurka occupies, Crushing and a confusing noise; Spurs of the Cavalier Guard clash, The feet of graceful ladies fly, And following them ye might espy Full many a glance like lightning flash, And by the fiddle's rushing sound The voice of jealousy ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... glibly enough, to do her justice, so long as there was no immediate question of dispensing alms. But for all that the next whining beggar would move her tender heart, his glib inventions playing upon it like a fiddle, and she would give as recklessly as though there were no such things in the whole wide world as soup-kitchens and organised charities and common-sense. "Because, you know," she would afterward salve her conscience, "I couldn't be sure ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... me, will yer?" he growled, "when I'm so jolly ill. Just let me get hold o' that there fiddle o' yours, Master Billy Mustard, and I'll smash ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... was a jolly old soul, And a jolly old soul was he; He called for his ale, and he called for his beer, And he called for his fiddle-diddle-dee. ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... Man of the Isles, Whose face was pervaded with smiles; He sang "High dum diddle," and played on the fiddle, That amiable Man ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... No stranger has a right to all the doctor. (rises and stands by table R., making notes in book) All right, Master Robjohns, you shall play the fiddle ...
— The Squire - An Original Comedy in Three Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... female form, hooded in a veil, which, chameleon-like, sported all colours. She held Virtue and Vice by the hands, and danced a trio with them. For music, a naked savage played upon an oaten pipe, a European philosopher scraped the fiddle, while an Asiatic beat the drum; and although these contradictory tones would have distracted an harmonious ear, yet the dancers did not once lose the step,—so well had they learnt their parts. When the maiden gave Vice her hand, she coquetted and ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... ideas and brisk in movement stands in front of and facing the other players and rapidly repeats this verse, performing some action that the other players immediately imitate—such as beating a drum, playing a fiddle, sawing wood. Without pausing he varies his actions, the others continuing to follow his movements. Rapidity of time and vivacity determine the success of ...
— Games and Play for School Morale - A Course of Graded Games for School and Community Recreation • Various
... escapes from mimicry. He conjures, he juggles, he plays selections from Carmen and Cavaleria Rusticana on a fiddle made out of a cigar box and a broom-handle. The Provinces accept him with mild approbation. He tries Paris, the Paris of Menilmontant and the Outer Boulevards; but Paris, not being amused, prefers his mimicry. He is alone, mind you. No more Coincon combinations. If he is to be insulted, ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... as they cross de trestle. One pick a banjo, one play de fiddle. They sing and whoop, they laugh; they holler to de people on de ground, and sing out, "Good-bye." ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... he added, turning the subject. "Some of those fiddling fellows are extraordinary. They really play very decently. They must have a lot of talent, when you think of all the different things they do besides their feats of strength—they act, and play the fiddle, and sing, ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... its thin old walls, vibrates at night like a great dry fiddle; the slightest noises grow great in it, become disfigured and ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... alive for a week or two. And here was Edward, with a smooth brown leather wallet full of ten- and twenty-dollar bills, which he peeled off without counting, exactly as if money grew on trees, or as if coal came out of the earth and walked into furnaces to the sound of a fiddle and a flute! ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... much, and are sharp and symmetrical; the cut-water stretches, with a graceful curve, far out beyond them toward the long sweeping martingal, and is surmounted by a gilt scroll, or, as the sailors call it, a fiddle-head. The black stern is ornamented by a group of white figures in bas relief, which give a lively air to the otherwise sombre and vacant expression, and beneath the cabin-windows is painted the name of the ship, and her port of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... Sam jerked his thumb back to show that he meant Si Lee; "sounds like a Chinese laundry. I guess that's the only thing he isn't. He can do any mortal thing but get on in life. He's been a soldier an' a undertaker an' a cook He plays a fiddle he made himself; it's a rotten bad one, but it's away ahead of his playing. He stuffs birds—that Owl in the parlour is his doin'; he tempers razors, kin doctor a horse or fix up a watch, an' he does it in about ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... always your million-and-one favorite melodies which nobody but that all-around musical amateur, the Auto-Comrade, can so exquisitely whistle, hum, strum, fiddle, blat, or roar. There is also a universe full of new ones for him to improvise. And he is the jolliest sort of fellow musician, because, when you play or sing a duet with him, you can combine with the exciting give-and-take ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... I discredits de imbimin' of awjus liquors. De imbimin' of awjus liquors, de wiolution of de Sabbaf, de playin' of de fiddle, and de usin' of by-words, dey is de fo' sins of de conscience; an' if any man sin de fo' sins of de conscience, de debble done sharp his fork fo' dat man.—Ain't that ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... not care how he turned you inside out. Never ask him a question, as if you sought to know what he did not himself confide. So there is some thing, you think, in a flute, after all? There are people who prefer the fiddle." ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... April 2, 1711, took note of the severance which had taken place between sign and trade, and of the absurdity that the sign no longer had any significance. After satirizing first, the monstrous conjunctions in signs of "Dog and Gridiron," "Cat and Fiddle" and so forth; and next the absurd custom by which young tradesmen, at their first starting in business, added their own signs to those of the masters under whom they had served their apprenticeship; the essayist goes on ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... do that same," he replied, with a modest air, which drew forth a peal of laughter. When the fiddle was produced and O'Rook struck up reels, and strathspeys, and hornpipes, with a precision of touch and time and perfection of tune that was far above the average of amateurs, the joy of the party could no longer find vent through eye and mouth. They were forced to open the safety-valves of ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... stood there thunderstruck. He saw that he had a successful rival: the reference to Madame made it obvious that this was the Duc de Guise, and left him in no doubt that his sister was to play second fiddle to the Princess de Montpensier. Jealousy, frustration and rage joining to the dislike which he already had for the Duc roused him to a violent fury; and he would have given there and then some bloody mark of ...
— The Princess of Montpensier • Madame de La Fayette
... but that Shakespeare is fairly chargeable with some breaches of good taste: these however are so few and of such a kind, that they still leave him just our highest authority in the School of Taste. Here, as elsewhere, he is our "canon of Polycletus." So Raphael made a painting of Apollo play the fiddle on Parnassus,—a grosser breach of good taste than any thing Shakespeare ever did. And yet Raphael is the painter of the finest taste in the world!—All which just approves the old proverb, that "no man is wise at all hours": so that we may still affirm without abatement the fine saying of Schlegel, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... came along the road, and Br'er Rabbit called him, and Br'er Fox said: "What are you doing in there?" "They are going to have a ball here to-night and want me to play the fiddle for them, so they put me in here. I wouldn't disappoint them," said Br'er Rabbit. "But, Br'er Fox, you always could beat me playing the fiddle. Now, they offer to pay two dollars for every tune. Suppose you take my place; my wife is sick and I must ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... Somme fields for a week's rest-cure for jangled nerves. "I don't care a damn for death; but it's the waiting for it, the devilishness of its uncertainty, the sight of one's pals blown to bits about one, and the animal fear under shell-fire, that break one's pluck... My nerves are like fiddle-strings." ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... 'I have played second fiddle to you often, do let me take command this time—or, at all events, wait till you see my plot unfolded. Then you can take your part, or leave it alone, or modify to taste. Nothing can ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... inauguration business was commonplace. That is Ohio statesmanship, somehow. But good may come of it, and you and I want to help it, so far as it wants national food, to bear fruit. Damn all your politics and partisanship! Humbug—twaddle—fiddle- dee-dee, made for lazy louts who want jobs and bosses who want power. Well, we are out now for a long time, and we might as well forget bitterness, or rather submerge it in the bigger call of the nation. All of which you characterize ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... is jolly!" she piped, "and I've just had the very gloriousest tramp and I feel as fine as a—what is it they say? Oh, as fine as a violin—I—I mean fiddle. I walked miles and miles—perhaps not quite so far—and the wind was blowing a blue streak right in my face. Ugh! first it made me shiver and creep up into my collar. But bimeby I got nice and warmy, and my cheeks ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... versifier suspects that he lacks the true inspiration, he had better try the confidence game, and induce the public to admire by writing that which no one can understand. It would seem, too, that writing poetry and playing on the fiddle have this much in common, that a true genius at either is fit for nothing else. The amateurs can take care of themselves, but the born-masters display an amiable worthlessness for every thing but their art. Now General Thompson was thoroughly wide-awake and competent ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... moral, and patter won't level 'em up. Wy yer might as well talk of a popgun a holding its own with a Krupp. 'Ow the brains and the ochre got fust ladled hout is a bit beyond me, But to fancy as them as has got 'em will part is dashed fiddle-de-dee. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... Wrangerton. There's but one inn there fit to put a dog to sleep in, and when we got there we found the house turned out of window for a ball, all the partitions down on the first floor, and we driven into holes to be regaled with distant fiddle-squeak. So Fitzhugh's Irish blood was up for a dance, and I thought I might as well give in to it, for the floor shook so that there was no taking a cigar in peace. So you see the stars ordained it, and it is of no use making a row about one's destiny,' ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wintry sunset; but my boys saw only the bright side of the tapestry, and would have liked nothing better than to change places with little James Speaight. To stand in the midst of Fairyland, and play beautiful tunes on a toy fiddle, while all the people clapped their hands—what could quite equal that? Charley began to think it was no such grand thing to be a circus-rider, and the dazzling career of policeman had lost something of its glamour in the eyes ...
— The Little Violinist • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... riding-whips hung on them; and the pictures of his ancestors, in their antiquated dresses, and slender, tarnished, antiquated frames. In his drawing-room you will find none of your new grand pianos and fashionable couches and ottomans; but an old spinet and a fiddle, another set of those long-legged, tall-backed chairs, two or three little settees, a good massy table, and a fine large carved mantle-piece, with bright steel dogs instead of a modern stove, and logs of oak burning, if it be cold. At table, all his plate is of the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... found them all in good health, and much pleased at having arrived at this long wished for spot, and in order to add in some measure to the general pleasure which seemed to pervade our little community, we ordered a dram to be issued to each person; this soon produced the fiddle, and they spent the evening with much hilarity, singing & dancing, and seemed as perfectly to forget their past toils, as they appeared regardless of those to come. in the evening, the man I had sent up the river this morning ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... may talk their fill, For dreams are good, and my life stands still While their lives' red ashes the gossips stir; But my fiddle knows—and I talk ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... evidently has the remnants of a harp in his raised hands. The third or central figure is supposed merely to have held a hawk upon his wrist; whilst the fourth seeks to extract harmony from a dilapidated bagpipe; and the fifth, with crossed legs, strums complacently away upon the fiddle. The ground floor of the quaint old tenement is to-day an oil and colour shop, the front of which is covered with chequers in all ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... 'em, Peter. Look at 'em," laughed the captain. "It's a most noble sight! Watch the old fellow playing the fiddle, and I'll lay my eyes that in a half minute or so you'll have ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... contradict her. You puff and blow like a seal when you come upstairs; your paunch rises and falls like the diamond on a woman's forehead! It is pretty plain that you served in the dragoons; you are a very ugly-looking old man. Fiddle-de-dee. If you have any mind to keep my respect, I recommend you not to add imbecility to these qualities by imagining that such a girl as I am will be content with your asthmatic love, and not look for youth and good looks and pleasure ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... parties." Publisher and author were for the nonce on the best of terms. The latter, no doubt, saw his opening; was more than ready to undertake the work, and had no quarrel with the remuneration offered. But even then he was not the man to play second fiddle to anybody. Before they parted, he had quite succeeded in turning the tables on Seymour. The original proposal had been that the artist should produce four caricatures on sporting subjects every month, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... "Precisely the fiddle-stick, Mr Forster! you did mean it, and you do mean it, and this is all the return that I am to expect for my kindness and anxiety for your welfare—slaving and toiling all day as I do; but you're incorrigible, Mr Forster: look at you, helping yourself out of your ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... Monkey, "wait a little! How can we get our music right? It's plain, you mustn't sit as you are. You, Mishka, with your counter-bass, face the alto. I will sit opposite the second fiddle. Then a different sort of music will begin: we shall set the very ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... more like one of the family, and there was a couple of good-looking daughters. One of them was clean gone on me. There are some grand girls down that way. I always got on well with the girls, because I could play the fiddle and sing a bit. They'll be glad to see me when I get back there again, I know. I'll be all right—no more bother about tucker. I'll just let things slide as soon as I spot the house. I'll bet my boots the kettle will be boiling, and everything ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... Pete home ter take keer dem chillen, an' I done set him a good job o' whitewashin' to do while I'm gone, too. De principles' weddin'-present I gwine fetch Pete is a fiddle. Po' Pete been wantin' a good fiddle all his life, an' he 'ain't nuver is had one. But, of co'se, I don't 'low ter let him play on it tell de full year ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... once, and then a grand clatter and scramble and string of jumps, up and down, back and forward, one hand over the other, like a stampede of rats and mice more than like anything I call music. I like to hear a woman sing, and I like to hear a fiddle sing, but these noises they hammer out of their wood-and-ivory anvils—don't talk to me; I know the difference between a bullfrog and a wood-thrush.—The ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... 'bout dem times. Disher house was full up all de time wid comp'ny; gran' comp'ny, what dress all de time in silk an' go walkin' 'bout under de trees an' ridin' 'bout over de prairie in de day time; and mos' every night dey call my ole man in to play de fiddle an' den, laws, how dem young folks dance! An' ole Mas' an' ole Mis' an' all de young ladies an gentlemen use to come down to de cabins—dey was all burnt up, time o' de war—an' sakes, honey! de hosses an' de cayages an' de niggers an' disher big plantation, ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... that's waur!' returned Steenie. 'I wudna gang intil sic a place wi' feet siclike's my ain—na, no for what the warl cud gie me!—no for lang Lowrie's fiddle and a' the tunes intil't! I wud never get my feet oot o' ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... Mrs. Hargrave, beating a tiny hand on the arm of her chair. "Fiddle-dee-dee and fiddlesticks with your 'lowering influences'! What did you do but leave her to her own thoughts and no one to talk to but a stiff old woman and a houseful of servants? Well, you have done it! What are you doing to ...
— The Girl Scouts at Home - or Rosanna's Beautiful Day • Katherine Keene Galt
... stiff and unyielding. Both sails were snow-white, semi-transparent and supple in movement, like the ivory sails on the model ships in Rosenborg Palace. The mast seemed to bend slightly and the stays were as taut as fiddle-strings. The boat quivered like a leaf. The waves pounded hard against the thin strakes of the boat's side. I could feel them on my cheek, though their dampness never penetrated; but in between these hammer blows their little pats were ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... welcomed and kissed by the aged mulatto nurse. On rivers, boatmen safely moored at nightfall, in their boats, under shelter of high banks, Some of the younger men dance to the sound of the banjo or fiddle—others sit on the gunwale, smoking and talking; Late in the afternoon the mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing in the Great Dismal Swamp-there are the greenish waters, the resinous odour, the plenteous ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... Fiddle was handed over. She was rosy and round with her mother's blue eyes. She wore a little buttoned hat of white pique, with strings tied ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... mathematical genius, had been able to pay his way through Cambridge University by the scholarships and prizes which he had won. One beautiful little dark-eyed daughter of seven was playing in a West End Theatre as the dormouse in "Alice in Wonderland." She was second fiddle to Alice herself, also, and could sing all her songs. Her pay was some five pounds a week, poor enough for the attraction she proved, but more than all the rest of the family put together earned. At that time I never went to theatres. Acquaintances had persuaded me that ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... she said. "I never do. And I've no enmity against all manner of fiddle-faddling, if folks have got nothin' better to do. But 'tain't so with our girls. They work for their livin', and they've got to work; and what I say is, they're in a way to get to hate work, if they don't despise it, and in my judgment that's a poor business. It's going the wrong way to ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
