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More "Hum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will, she will feel more at home when we meet." There was a pause of a moment, and then Guy, as he appropriated a cigar from a china stand that tempted him close by, resumed, "this certainly is a strange, unlooked- for incident in your hum-drum life, but it is also a very fortunate one, since she is such a comfort to you and such an acquisition to your home—I fancy, from your description she could scarcely be otherwise. I hope we will all be an agreeable and sociable family yet, and now, ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... seemed to have its own speshul whissel tied onto it. Some of them rumbled along like a fast train hittin a down grade. Some would just sing an hum to themselves sort of quiet an happy while others would go yellin an screamin across like the fire department on an exhibishun run. There was one bunch that squealed like a trolly goin round a turn on dry rails. You sort of felt as if someone ought ...
— "Same old Bill, eh Mable!" • Edward Streeter
... sissy; baby's all right. Bless my soul! who'd want to carry off a baby? There aint no wild beasts roamin' round, and most of us's got babies enough o' our own to hum, without borryin of the neighbors. You'll find him there all safe enough when we get back. Them shad, ye see, was promised at one o'clock up to the hotel. Cap'n Kent, ye know, he never breaks ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... through these preachers like the wind breathing through the pipes of a great organ. To those who have ears to hear, the roar of the ocean, or the sound of the mighty rushing wind, are as an anthem of praise. The song of birds, the hum of insects, every voice in the world of Nature combine to take part in a hymn of thanksgiving, a great Benedicite, and to sing, "O all ye works of the Lord bless ye the Lord, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever." And ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... and had a delightful ride, and a much more delightful tete-a-tete. This Lee appears to be a hum-drum, disagreeable Creature. Tea is ready, and ...
— Journal of a Young Lady of Virginia, 1782 • Lucinda Lee Orr
... saw his household boat, with familiar faces in it, patiently rising and falling, on the short waves by the San Dominick's side; and then, glancing about the decks where he stood, saw the oakum-pickers still gravely plying their fingers; and heard the low, buzzing whistle and industrious hum of the hatchet-polishers, still bestirring themselves over their endless occupation; and more than all, as he saw the benign aspect of nature, taking her innocent repose in the evening; the screened sun in the quiet camp of the west shining out like the mild light from Abraham's tent; ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... somnambulism! More confused operation never was. A solid placid People, heavily asleep (and snoring much, shall we say, and inarticulately grunting and struggling under indigestions, Constitutional and other? Do but listen to the hum of those extinct Pamphlets and Parliamentary Oratories of theirs!),—yet an honestly intending People; and keenly alive to any commandment from Heaven, that could pierce through the thick skin of them into their big obstinate heart. Such a commandment, then and there, was that monition about ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... heavy machinery lab on the lower floor. In a short time he returned with a tractor-like machine equipped with a small derrick, designed to get its power from the electric mains. He ran the machine over to the ship. The others looked up as they heard the rumble and hum of its powerful motor. From the crane dangled ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... king's daughter was shut up in some distant hiding-place, Gunnar strained his wits in every nerve to track her out. Hence, while he was himself conducting the search with others, his doubtful ear caught the distant sound of a subterranean hum. Then he went on slowly, and recognized a human voice with greater certainty. He ordered the ground underfoot to be dug down to the solid rock; and when the cave was suddenly laid open, he saw the winding tunnels. The servants were ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... from a different angle was followed by the quick ring of steel bullets striking the lava all around Gale. His first idea, as he heard the projectiles sing and hum and whine away into the air, was that they were coming from above him. He looked up to see a number of low, white and dark knobs upon the high point of lava. They had not been there before. Then he saw little, pale, leaping tongues of fire. As he dodged down he distinctly heard ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... strength sweeps across it. The larks are so multitudinous that no distinct song can be caught, and amidst the confused melody comes the note of the thrush and the blackbird. A constant under-running accompaniment is just audible in the hum of innumerable insects and the sharp buzz of flies darting past the ear. Only those who live in the open air and watch the fields and sea from hour to hour and day to day know what they are and what they mean. ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... he agreed. "I feel as if the best part of you and me had gone along with her. Well, t'other parts have got to go back to the store and wait on customers, I presume likely. Heave ahead and let's do it. Ah, hum! I cal'late we'd ought to be thankful we've got work to do, Zoeth. It'll help take up our minds. There are goin' to be lonesome days for you and ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... The hum of the streets was hushed. Few sounds came from without; but the silence that had so long reigned in the mansion, was broken by the gentle tones of loving and ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... street below comes up a constant hum of loud voices, often rising so high that one runs to see the fight commence, and by the time one has crossed the room it has all subsided and everybody is walking off in good-humor. Meanwhile the grave little donkeys are constantly ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... and the profound stillness in which the capital of New Spain had been buried during the preceding two hours, was suddenly broken by the hum of innumerable voices. The noise, which commenced in the suburbs, extended itself rapidly, and increased almost to a roar, scaring away the gallinazos and other birds of prey, that were as usual seeking food in the streets and squares of the city ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... him up to-day. I start operations in Grey Town this afternoon. Did it ever strike you that this place needs stirring up? It's been sleeping ever since it was born. I have come here to make things hum, I tell you that." ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... you," he said, turning in his chair toward Mrs. Highcamp. He clasped his hands behind his head, and looking up at the ceiling began to hum a little, trying his voice like a musician tuning an instrument. Then, looking at Edna, he began ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... another; they glowed and blazed against masses of buildings, and they hung at enormous heights in mid-air here and there, apparently without any support. Everywhere was the glow and dazzle of their brilliancy of light, with the distant bee hum of a nearing elevated train, at intervals gradually deepening into a roar. The river looked miles below them, and craft with sparks or blaze of light went slowly ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... generally jumped on their legs; and, in the midst of a hum of talk and laughter, he informed Evan and Jack, that he invited them cordially to a supper up-stairs, and would be pleased if they would partake of it, and in a great rage ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the two men groped their way on through the dark gloom of the woods, in spite of their mute pursuers. The moonlight flickered down athwart the trackless soil as they went; the hum of insects innumerable droned deep along the underbrush. Now and then the startled scream of a night jar broke the monotony of the buzz that was worse than silence; owls boomed from the hollow trees, and fireflies darted dim through the open ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... basked on the rising ground, an old brown frame with lichens crusting the roof. There were two front doors, a flight of wooden steps leading up to each, and three high windows along the visible side. All these stood open letting out a pleasant hum, through which the cracked voice of an old man occasionally broke. No hump of belfry stood upon its back. The afternoon sun was the bell which called that neighborhood together for Sunday-school. And this unconscious duty performed, the afternoon sun now brightened the graves which crowded to the ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... drag Nellie up the rocks to the opening before mentioned. The girl resisted with all of her strength, and Vorlange received a box on the left ear which made that member of his body hum for a long ...
— The Boy Land Boomer - Dick Arbuckle's Adventures in Oklahoma • Ralph Bonehill
... none to be found; and if there had been, it could not have cooled the brow's inward fever. The Park lay before him, dark and misty; the lights of the few vehicles passing gleamed now and again; the hum of life was dying out in the streets, men's free steps, careless voices. He looked down, and wondered whether any one of those men knew what care meant as he knew it; whether the awful skeleton, that never quitted ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... question answered itself a moment later, when the lodge-keeper, not seeing the other fellow, half opened the iron gates and let my bonnet in between them. The car almost knocked him down as we raced through—I could hear him bawling "Stop!" even above the hum of the engine. ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... melancholy deer stood afar off gazing upon the intruder, was vocal with the blithe melodies of the infant year,—the sharp, yet sweet, voices of birds,—and (heard at intervals) the chirp of the merry grasshopper or the hum of the awakened bee. He sighed, as he now looked around, and recalled the change both of time and season; and with that fondness of heart which causes man to knit his own little life to the varieties of ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... some flowers upon his grave, may not I? And that will bring the bees humming over it. How fond he was of going near the hives, to hear the bees hum! Where shall ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... harmonize the various elements in the school, was not deemed satisfactory. He was too much like Socrates. At last they found a man after their own heart. He had traveled and studied long abroad; was a dashing, brilliant fellow; would surely make things hum; so at least said those who recommended him (and he did). But he was still a poor student in Scotland; his passage money must be raised by the school if he was to be secured. And raised it was. Four hundred and seventy-five dollars those one hundred and fifty poor boys and ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... In the darkness the Germans were unable to aim carefully. The boys heard the hum of bullets around them, but they did not falter. There was no second volley, for the lads had disappeared in the darkness, and the Germans were not minded ...
— The Boy Allies On the Firing Line - Or, Twelve Days Battle Along the Marne • Clair W. Hayes
... it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,—as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... tidings spread, and gathering grows the crowd: The hum of voices, and the laughter loud, And Woman's gentler anxious tone is heard— Friends'—husbands'—lovers' names in each dear word: 110 "Oh! are they safe? we ask not of success— But shall we see them? will their accents bless? From where the battle roars, the ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... the woods, looking neither tired nor annoyed about anything—looking only in earnest. To Ruth, especially, it came like a revelation. She looked around her with surprised eyes. There were intellectual faces on every hand. There was the hum of conversation all about her, for the meeting was not yet opened, and the tone of their words was different from any with which her life had been familiar; they seemed lifted up, enthused; they seemed to have found something worthy of enthusiasm. ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... where the water's din was heard, As down it fell into the other round, Resounding like the hum of swarming bees: When forth together issu'd from a troop, That pass'd beneath the fierce tormenting storm, Three spirits, running swift. They towards us came, And each one cried aloud, "Oh do thou stay! ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... goodly Lady, and The iustice of your hearts will thereto adde 'Tis pitty shee's not honest: Honorable; Prayse her but for this her without-dore-Forme, (Which on my faith deserues high speech) and straight The Shrug, the Hum, or Ha, (these Petty-brands That Calumnie doth vse; Oh, I am out, That Mercy do's, for Calumnie will seare Vertue it selfe) these Shrugs, these Hum's, and Ha's, When you haue said shee's goodly, come betweene, Ere you can say shee's honest: But ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... the road-side chapel, we must proceed to the fair, where the "busy hum of men" announced the approach of the mayor and corporate body to make ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... hum, or ha; these petty brands, That calumny doth use;— For calumny will sear Virtue itself:—these shrugs, these bums, and ha's, When you have said, she's goodly, come between, Ere you can ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... "Hum! I'll have to see about that," said Mr. Bobbsey slowly. "I suppose the circus people will want him back, for he must be valuable. Perhaps some clown ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at School • Laura Lee Hope
... railings. Upon the one side were tiers of seats for the castle gentlefolks and the guests. Upon the other stood the burghers from the town, clad in sober dun and russet, and yeomanry in green and brown. The whole of the great vaulted hall was full of the dull hum of many people waiting, and a ceaseless restlessness stirred the crowded throng. But at last a whisper went around that the King was coming. A momentary hush fell, and through it was heard the noisy clatter of horses' feet ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... composed himself beside the camp-fire to smoke and rest awhile before going to bed. The silence of the wilderness enfolded lake and shore; yet presently it came to be a silence accentuated by near and distant sounds, faint, wild, lonely—the low hum of falling water, the splash of tiny waves on the shore, the song of insects, and the dismal hoot ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... wished to be alone, completely alone, so as to dream at his ease. Then he stretched himself in the sun on the warm grass, opened his breviary, the discreet confidant of all wandering thoughts, the screen for the priest's looks and thoughts, and listened to the insects' hum. ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... sentimental, he is frigid. He can be as compact as Tacitus, and as prolix as Thackeray. He can be as sentimental as Werther, and as heartless as Napoleon. He can cry with the bird, grow with the grass, and hum with the bee; he can float with the spirits, and dream with the fevered. He is everywhere at home: in the novel, in the story, in the sketch, in the diary, in the epistle. Whatever form of composition he touches, let once his ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... 'fore the night's out," said Smith, addressing any who cared to listen, and indicating "Poker" John with a jerk of the head in the direction of the door through which the two men had just passed. "Make the banks hum when they raise the 'bid.' Guess ther' ain't many o' ther' likes roun' these parts. Rye or Scotch?" to "Lord" Bill and three other men who came up at that moment. Mancha and "Pickles" were with him, and a fourth player—the deposed captain ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... that he will open the wide jaws of hungry war, even so did Agamemnon heave many a heavy sigh, for his soul trembled within him. When he looked upon the plain of Troy he marvelled at the many watchfires burning in front of Ilius, and at the sound of pipes and flutes and of the hum of men, but when presently he turned towards the ships and hosts of the Achaeans, he tore his hair by handfuls before Jove on high, and groaned aloud for the very disquietness of his soul. In the end he deemed it best to go at once to Nestor ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... Things hum. Troops like ants all over the ground. In tents, in bivvies, in the open, everywhere. And the eternal chain of motor lorries bringing up ammunition and supplies. These one sees all over France. But here they block half the roads. Well, yesterday morning I rode out alone with the Colonel and two ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... song of the birds hushed—I smelt the sea—I smelt the perfume of heated summer air rising from fields and flowers, the ineffable scents of June and of the long days of the year—and with it, from countless green meadows beyond, came the hum of myriad summer life, children's voices, sweet pipings, and the ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... eyelids. He caught sight of her, and she was afraid he would be angry, and warn her off for trespassing; but he nodded and called out something in a friendly manner—"Good day," perhaps. She could not hear the words for the hum of the weir and the roaring of the machinery ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... I, damn it, I was all Rage; and hadst not thou restrain'd me, I had certainly pull'd that Rogue of a Holder forth by the Ears from his sanctify'd Tub. 'Sdeath, he hum'd and haw'd all my Patience away, nosed and snivel'd me to Madness. Heaven! That thou shouldst suffer such Vermin to infect the Earth, such Wolves amongst thy Flocks, such Thieves and Robbers of all Laws of God and Man, in thy Holy Temples. I rave ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... remember, on which I used to cogitate profoundly, was how to defeat an enemy without having arms. My preoccupation with this question, amidst the hum of the boys reciting their lessons, comes back to me even now. If I could properly train up a number of dogs, tigers and other ferocious beasts, and put a few lines of these on the field of battle, that, I thought, would serve very ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... still. We heard along the woods, at the bottom of the valleys, and on the summits of the rocks, the weak cry and the soft murmurs of the birds, exulting in the brightness of the night, and the serenity of the atmosphere. The hum of insects was heard in the grass. The stars sparkled in the heavens, and their trembling and lucid orbs were reflected upon the bosom of the ocean. Virginia's eyes wandered over its vast and gloomy horizon, distinguishable from the bay of the island by the red fires in the fishing boat. ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... of his life. Through the warm night air the hoarse croaking of distant frogs and the mournful note of the toucan floated to his ears. In the street without he heard at intervals the pattering of bare feet in the hot, thick dust, as tardy fishermen returned from their labors. The hum of insects about his toldo lulled him with its low monotone. The call of a lonely jaguar drifted across the still lake from the brooding jungle beyond. A great peace lay over the ancient town; and when, in the early hours of morning, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... meadows, decked in livelier green, The yellow corn-field, and the blossomed bean: A hundred flocks o'er smiling pastures roam, And hark! the music of the harvest home! Methinks I hear the hammer's busy sound, The cheerful hum of human voices round; The laughter and the song that lightens toil, Sung in the language of my native isle! The vision leads me on by many a stream; And spreading cities crowd upon my dream, Where turrets darkly frown, and lofty spires Point to the stars and sparkle ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... one man or many, he replied that the Koothum-pas were many, but there was only one man or chief over them of that name; the disciples being always called after the names of their guru. Hence the name of the latter being Koot-hum, that of his disciples was "Koot-hum-pa." Light was shed upon this explanation by a Tibetan dictionary, where we found that the word "pa" means "man;" "Bod-pa" is a "man of Bod or Thibet," &c. Similarly Koothum-pa means man or disciple of Koothoom or Koothoomi. At Giansi, the ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... brought me happiness, for my brother is with me safe once more; our armies are fast gaining ground, our victories are more numerous, and hope dawns that the flag of liberty will yet wave triumphantly over a free and happy nation; and I can once more mingle a song and not a sob with the busy hum of my wheel." ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... careless stroke, his paddle struck a submerged log and the slender blade snapped short off with a loud crack, the ticklish canoe careened suddenly to one side, then righted again with a sullen splash. At the sound the silent point quickly stirred with life. There was the hum of excited voices and a blinding flash of flame lit up the darkness, followed by the sharp crack of rifles and the hum ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... from his head, and his body, following, lays its lumbering length on the stairs. Happy fraternity! how useful is that body! His companion, laying his muddled head upon it, says it will serve for a pillow. "E'ke-hum-spose 'tis so? I reckon how I'm some-ec! eke!-somewhere or nowhere; aint we, Joe? It's a funny house, fellers," he continues to soliloquise, laying his arm affectionately over his companion's neck, and again yielding to the caprice of ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... Sunday was not a day of rest to them; from early morning they were all engaged in different directions in prosecuting their search, and not until the curtain of night was spread over the town, and the hum of traffic and din of bustle had ceased, did they ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... transplant them, and I treasure them like gold. One cluster bears light-coloured bloom; another bears dark shades. I sit with head uncovered by the sparse-leaved artemesia hedge, And in their pure and cool fragrance, clasping my knees, I hum my lays. In the whole world, methinks, none see the light as peerless as these flowers. From all I see you have no other friend more intimate than me. Such autumn splendour, I must not misuse, as steadily it fleets. My gaze I fix on you as I am fain ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... eminence! Indeed, by force of magnetism A Russian poem's mechanism My scholar without aptitude At this time almost understood. How like a poet was my chum When, sitting by his fire alone Whilst cheerily the embers shone, He "Benedetta" used to hum, Or "Idol mio," and in the grate Would ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... rosicrucian. (Keller, Z. Gesch. d. B., p. 21.) The great organization did not take place until a great European power spread over it its protecting hand, i.e., in 1717, when in England the new English system of "Grand Lodges of Free and Accepted Masons" arose. (Keller, D. Soc. d. Hum., p. 18.) We see that Keller arrives by another and surer way than Katsch at the same result, and shows the continuity of the alchemists or rosicrucians and the later freemasons, if not in exactly the same way that Katsch has outlined it. In particular Keller gets along without the unproved statement ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... of heaven above, now partially lit by the late rising moon and twinkling stars, that were occasionally obscured by scraps of drifting clouds and flying scud; and, all the while, the noble ship tearing along, a thing of beauty and of life, mastering the elements and glorying in the fight, with the hum of the gale in the sails and its shrieking whistle through the rigging, and the ever-murmuring voices of the waters, all filling the air around as they sang the dirge of ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... may be noted in connection with this time of trouble. While the Secession war lasted, "the cotton famine" had full sway in Lancashire; unwonted and unwelcome light and stillness replaced the dun clouds of smoke and the busy hum that used to tell of fruitful, well-paid industry; and the patient people, haggard and pale but sadly submissive, were kept, and just kept, from starving by the incessant charitable effort of their ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... atmosphere of this great interior is inspiring; particularly of an evening, when it is thronged with soldiers, and civilian guests. The strains of music, the hum of many voices, the rhythmic shuffle on the waxed floor of the feet of the dancers—these eminently social sounds mingle and lose themselves in the spaces of the roof, like the voice of many waters. Tobacco smoke ascends ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... shady trees, The smell of flowers, the sound of brooks, The song of birds, and the hum of bees, Murmuring in green and fragrant nooks, The voice of children in the spring, Along the ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... a sign to Philip, to ask him if he was hungry; Philip replied in the affirmative, when his new acquaintance put his hand into a bag made of goat-skin, and pulled out a handful of very large beetles, and presented them to hum. Philip refused them with marks of disgust, upon which, the chief very sedately cracked and ate them; and having finished the whole handful, rose, and made a sign to Philip to follow him. As Philip rose, he perceived floating on the surf, his own chest; ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... them cried in chorus, so loudly that the hum of voices in the tavern became hushed, and all eyes ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... gloom of the storehouse hall. The metal door of the elevator stared inquiringly after her. She fled past it to the stairway. Every step of that ancient structure squeaked and groaned. First floor, second, third, fourth. The everyday hum of the sewing machines was absent. The room seemed to be holding its breath. Josie fancied that the very garments on the worktables lifted themselves inquiringly from their supine position to see what it was that disturbed their Sabbath rest. ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... inspired the audience to better lives and a higher faith. When he suddenly stopped and quickly seized a hymn-book, the audience drew a long sigh. At once people moved about again and looked at each other and smiled. The whole congregation were at one with the preacher. There was a low hum of whispering voices. But all was attention again when the hymn was read. Then the glorious song. One of the finest organists in the country, a blind gentleman by the name of Wood, was the power behind the throne. The organ did praise God. Every one was carried on in a flood of praise. It was rich. ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... between two and three hundred men, partly hired in Charleston, partly in Baltimore. There were in the several forts not only the cannon to arm them, but also considerable quantities of ammunition and other government property; and aware of the hum of secession preparation which began to fill the air in Charleston, Captain Foster in October asked the Ordnance Bureau at Washington for forty muskets, with which to arm twenty workmen in Fort Sumter and twenty in Castle Pinckney. "If," wrote the ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... hour went by. Things were livening up a bit. We began to hum a tune or two from the latest revue. Suddenly we were brought to our feet by a crashing sound that was absolutely indescribable in its intensity. I rushed up the incline into the trench. What a sight! ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... wore late, she began to grow uneasily curious to know in what manner Charlie and Jack Fyfe were lending countenance to this minor riot, if they were even participating in it. Eleven o'clock passed, and still there rose in the bunkhouse that unabated hum ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... of three men passing into the lobby of the largest hotel, there was a slender man of fifty years, with a well-knit figure, half closed, indifferent eyes, and an emphatic mouth. In the insistent hum of words about him, his voice sounded in a brisk utterance that carried ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... frightened at the sounds of carriages rolling in the distance. They often went out after that, and chose in preference the paths near the pond of Madrid where, behind sheltering shrubs, they sat talking and listening to the busy hum of Parisian ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of literary blow flies will pounce upon the errors with delight, and, buzzing with the ecstasy of infernal joy, endeavour to hum their readers into a belief of the profundity of their critic erudition;—I shall nevertheless, with Churchill, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... the splendid phalanx of guardsmen, followed by rigid infantrymen in measured tread; the clattering of horses' hoofs, the beat of drums, the clanking of scabbards and the jangling of royal banners, rising even above the hum of eager voices. The great coach of gold, with its half score of horses, rolled sombrely beneath nature's canopy of green, surrounded on all sides by proud members of the Royal Guard. Word came down the line that the Prince ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... finished my tale, he resumed: "I first thought the whole of this a hum, but I find I was mistaken. Your conference with M. Werner may lead to a reconciliation between us and Austria; what you said must open the eyes of M. Metternich. To convince him completely, I will write to him; and depict with so much clearness and truth ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... unsilenced on her lips, and her distracted soul scarcely yet freed from the sick thought of a possible deliverance, when the everlasting strain of admonishment, and re-enumeration of her errors, again penetrated the hum of the crowd. The preacher was Nicolas Midi, one of the eloquent members of that dark fraternity; and his text was in St. Paul's words: "If any of the members suffer, all the other members suffer with it." Jeanne was a rotten branch which had to be cut ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... and had evidently been dropped into the letter-box by David's hand. It appointed an interview at ten o'clock at a corner of the Ruins; of course, he could not come to the house. Hannah was out: with a little basket to make some purchases. There was a cheery hum of life about the Ghetto; a pleasant festival bustle; the air resounded with the raucous clucking of innumerable fowls on their way to the feather-littered, blood-stained shambles, where professional cut-throats wielded sacred knives; boys armed with little braziers of glowing coal ran ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... remember undoing the straps with benumbed and aching fingers. He did not remember the befogged and stumbling "walk" into the Control Room. Dimly, as if viewing himself and the room from a distant world, he switched on the dying hum of the radio and tried futilely to ...
— Rescue Squad • Thomas J. O'Hara
... what Tennyson meant?" Or, "Wait a minute," she adds brightly, "How would this do?" Then she repeats the passage with the right emphasis, action, and intonation, giving the meaning clearly and fully. "Don't you think that must be what is meant?" she asks questioningly. "Hum-m," says the actor, looking at the lines. "Ah, very likely. Perhaps it is." It is agreed that it shall be spoken that way, and the actor gives a delicate and truthful reading of the part, which will procure him a pat ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... one that Grace recognized, though she had never before heard in it the note of agitation and undignified excitement. There were no ponderous pauses and "Hum—ha's" now. ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... actor give this word "so" its proper emphasis. Shakespeare's meaning is—"lov'd you? Hum!—so I do still," &c. There has been no change in my opinion:—I think as ill of you as I did. Else Hamlet tells an ignoble falsehood, and a useless one, as the last speech to Guildenstern—"Why ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... spiritual beauty. Boats were passing on every side, some with gay parties of three to six, others with but two passengers, who did not seem to need the presence of more, nor indeed to be conscious that any others existed. The hum of earnest or glad voices here contrasted strongly with silence and meditation there. Venice is a City of the Past, and wears her faded yet queenly robes more gracefully ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... that followed, broken only by the hum of the arithmetic-tape, Sam wondered at himself. As kids went, Mark had never been a nuisance. Certainly Rhoda had never had any trouble with him. But Rhoda had been altogether different. Sam was tough and he had always got a sense of satisfaction out of knowing that he was hard-boiled. Or at ...
— Dead Man's Planet • William Morrison
... sombre vistas of this phantom-evoking solitude, faint and far comes a strange sound—a low, vibrating, booming hum, above which, now and again, arises a shrill, long-drawn wail. The effect is indescribably gruesome and eerie—in fact, terror-striking—even if human, for there is an indefinable something, in sight, and sound, and surrounding, calculated to tell, if telling were needed, that this is indeed one ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... and I could see only a bottomless darkness with spectral patches of crimson and purple floating therein. Yet if I could not see, I could hear. Out of this darkness came a sound, a sound like the angry hum one can hear if one puts one's ear outside a hive of bees, a sound out of that enormous hollow, it may be, ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... this aristocrat of the catgut is posturing sardonically before the three bored fates. He is pouring twenty years, twenty well-spent years, into a tawdry little ballad. Ah, how our baron's fiddle sings! And the darkened faces in front hum to themselves: "When you're flirt-ing with another, do you ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... maiden had in heart stuff to render such small gossip a hum of summer midges. She did not imagine the dialogue concerned her in any way. She noticed Mr. Stuart Rem's attentive scrutiny of her from time to time. She had no sensitiveness, hardly a mind for things about her. To-morrow she was to see Captain Dartrey. She dwelt on that prospect, for an escape ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... round the deserted supper-room, whence even the last flunkey had retired in order to join his friends in the hall below. All was silence in the dimly-lighted room, whilst the sound of the gavotte, the hum of distant talk and laughter, and the rumble of an occasional coach outside, only seemed to reach this palace of the Sleeping Beauty as the murmur of some flitting spooks ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... Englishman must ever swell with pride as he contemplates his country's greatness. He looks around him, and his eye every where meets with the signs of increasing opulence and prosperity, while his ear is filled with the busy hum of an industrious, and, despite the idle babblings of the ignorant, and the empty declamation of interested, selfish, and disappointed men, a contented population, happy in the enjoyment of comfort, beyond that of the labouring classes of most other ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... along her keel the merry tides make stir No more. The running waves that sparkled at her prow Seethe to the chains and sing no more with laughter now. No more the clean sea-furrow follows her. No more To the hum of her gallant tackle the hale Nor'-westers roar. No more her bulwarks journey. For the only boon they crave Is the guerdon of all good ships and true, the boon of a ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... Euripides roundly replied, "Like enough; but here is the difference: thy verses will not last these three days, mine will to all time." Which was as much as to tell him he could not write a verse. I have met many of these rattles that made a noise and buzzed. They had their hum, and no more. Indeed, things wrote with labour deserve to be so read, and will ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... nature of musicall sounds made by strings, mighty prettily; and told me that having come to a certain number of vibrations proper to make any tone, he is able to tell how many strokes a fly makes with her wings, (those flies that hum in their flying by the note that it answers to in musique, during their flying. That, I suppose, is a little too much refined; but his discourse in general of sound was mighty fine. To St. James's, where ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... the great range of buildings began to hum like a hive of bees. The soldiers still half asleep, rushed hither and thither shouting. The officers also, developing the characteristic excitement of the Abati race in this hour of panic, yelled and screamed at them, beating them with their fists and swords ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... there is no sound or motion except the hum and floating steam from the tea-kettle. Presently the old man murmurs in his sleep, clenching his hand. Slowly the hand ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... a tune, a refrain, an air, whatever you call it, so catchy that people would hum it and sing it on the spot? I want a perfectly irresistible ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... and dragged her to the car. Strangwise had the door open and between them they thrust her in. Bellward and the woman mounted after her while Strangwise, after starting the engine, sprang into the driving-seat outside. With a low hum the big car glided forth ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... breeze fluttering the curtains brought in the gay sound of bells, the high clear bells of Hanseatic days, rejoicing at Napoleon's new success—by order of Napoleon. A bee sailed harmoniously into the room, made the circuit of it, and sought the open again with a hum that faded ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... together, and as they went up the stairs, they heard the hum of many voices in the room. "All the world and his wife are here to-night," said Phineas. They overtook a couple of men at the door, so that there was something of the bustle of a crowd as they entered. There was a difficulty in finding places in which ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... forth from a secret place, and led we know not through what mysterious passages, to a point where the tumult of life burst suddenly upon her ears. She heard the tramp of footsteps, the rattle of wheels, and the mingled hum of a multitude of voices, with strains of music and loud laughter breaking through. Emerging into a great, gloomy hall, a curtain was drawn aside; she found herself gently propelled into an open balcony, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... partition as he sat over books of exceptionally large type; but his ear became at last so accustomed to these slight noises from the other part of the house that he almost could witness the scenes they signified. A faint beat of half-seconds conjured up Thomasin rocking the cradle, a wavering hum meant that she was singing the baby to sleep, a crunching of sand as between millstones raised the picture of Humphrey's, Fairway's, or Sam's heavy feet crossing the stone floor of the kitchen; a light boyish step, and ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... of the scarlet stalks of the wild buckwheat. This level sea of weeds stood so high that when she threaded the narrow path they reached above her waist. The bees in the white asters were humming as they hum in apple bloom. The blue jays were calling and flying in low horizontal flights. The valley stretched to the south-east, then curved; a little mountain barred the view, upon whose pine-trees the distant air began to ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... gently. Then the two stood silent, looking out over the dim valley, hand in hand. The scent of the gardens was about them. Moving lights showed through the many windows of the great house. The waterfowl called sleepily. The churring of the night-hawks was continuous, soothing as the hum of a spinning-wheel. Somewhere, away in the Warren, a fox barked. In the eastern sky, the young moon began to climb above the ragged edge of the firs. When they spoke again it was very simply, in broken sentences, as children speak. The poetry of their relation ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... smooth and the great boat forged ahead with scarcely any motion, so that every seat was occupied and every one in good spirits. There was a hum of talk and rattle of dishes; the white-coated stewards scuttled back and forth, and the scene was as pleasant as the wholesale human consumption of ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... the spinning-wheel ceased with its hum, the silence was to Cosmo like the silence after a song, and his thoughts refused to do their humming alone. The same moment he fell—from a wondrous region where he dwelt with sylphs in a great palace, built ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... ears to the questions that already hum around me. People will say to me, What are your claims for daring to modify a page of our revolutionary history, on which every one seemed agreed? What right have you to weaken contemporary testimonies, you, who at the time of Bailly's death, were scarcely ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... the Hungry Folk attested the truth and fell each to telling his neighbor of the Sunlanders and their ways. There were mutterings from the younger men, who had wives to seek, and from the older men, who had daughters to fetch prices, and a low hum of rage rose higher ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... Grande. It shall rustle in the harvest and wave in the standing corn, on the extended prairies of the West, and be heard in the bleating folds find lowing herds upon a thousand hills. It shall be with those who delve in mines, and shall hum in the manufactories of New England, and in the cotton-gins of the South. It shall be proclaimed by the Stars and Stripes in every sea of earth, as the American Union, one and indivisible; upon the great thoroughfares, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... of necessity be the lady who is in love with me. See, how she surveys my person! certainly one wit knows another by instinct. By that old gentleman, it should be the lady Laura too. Hum! Benito, thou art ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... interesting item of news, at all events!—Twelve bottles! Dear me, that's a very respectable little stock indeed! I bet anything Lebedeff lent somebody money on deposit of this dozen of champagne. Hum! he's a nice fellow, is this prince! I like this sort of man. Well, I needn't be wasting time here, and if it's a case of champagne, why—there's ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... stranger come, but they had a chance to see that stranger yesterday, and took it quiet enough. What ailed them now? I leaned my arms on the rail and stared back. Devil a wink they had in them! Now and then I could see the children chatter, but they spoke so low not even the hum of their speaking came my length. The rest were like graven images: they stared at me, dumb and sorrowful, with their bright eyes; and it came upon me things would look not much different if I were on the platform ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the reading and sitting-rooms are filled with well-dressed men, guests and citizens, who have sauntered here from all parts of the city. Four-fifths are smoking, and the air is hazy with the "vapor of the weed." The hum of conversation is incessant, but the general tone is well-bred and courteous. In the farther end of the great hall a group of stock brokers may be seen comparing notes, and making bargains for the sale ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... past and in New York he had been known as a waiter, or should I say steward, he was known here as a manufacturer of patent medicine designed to rejuvenate the human race. He had not been long in town and was somewhat of a stranger yet, but he wouldn't be so long. He was going to make things hum, he was. Money for this, money for that, a horse where another man would walk, and mail—well, that alone would make this post-office worth while. Then the drugs ordered by wholesale. Those boxes over there were his, ready to be carted out to his manufactory. Count them, ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... been dead an' berried a week when I got there, and aunt was so mad she wouldn't write, nor scurcely speak tew me fer a consider'ble spell. I didn't blame her a mite, and felt jest the wust kind; so I give in every way, and fetched her raound. Yeou see I hed a cousin who'd kind er took my place tew hum while I was off, an' the old man hed left him a good slice er his money, an' me the farm, hopin' to keep me there. He'd never liked the lumberin' bizness, an' hankered arfter me a sight, I faound. Waal, seein' haow 'twas, I tried tew please him, late as it was; but ef there ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... your man did take plain Nature for God, an' he did talk fulishness 'bout finding Him in the scent o' flowers, the hum o' bees an' sichlike. Mayhap Nature's a gude working God for a selfish man but she ed'n wan for a maid, as you knaws by now. Then your faither—his God do sit everlastingly alongside hell-mouth, an' do laugh an' girn to see ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... this waste; no sign of life was visible; no flutter of wing, no hum of insect, no flash of lizard or reptile; even the shrill song of the cricket, that lover of burning solitudes, was unheard. The soil was formed of a micaceous, brilliant dust like ground sandstone, and here and there rose ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... after dinner. There was something delightful in the place, too, with its windows opening on the tree-tops of the Square, and the air of a warm autumn evening bringing in the sound of a woebegone brass band from afar, mixed with the endless hum of wheels with hoof-beats in the heart of it, like currants in a cake. The air was all the sweeter that a whiff of chimney-smoke broke into it now and again, and emphasized its quality. When the band left off the "Bohemian Girl" and rested, and imagination was picturing ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... marble which apparently surrounded this mighty city, and which rose immediately from the dark blue waters. As the navigator drew nearer, he observed that in most parts the quays were crowded with beings who, he trusted, were human, and already the hum of multitudes broke upon his inexperienced ear: to him a sound far more mysterious and far more exciting than the most poetical of winds to the most wind of poets. On the right of this vast city rose ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... memory Fitch and Stevens, and Bell and Fulton; thousands of locomotives, crossing the continents, will perpetuate the thought of the Stephensons and their colleagues in the introduction of the railway; the hum of millions of spindles and the music of the electric wire will tell of the work of Corliss and his contemporaries and successors who made these things possible, and all kingdoms and races, all nations, will revere the name of James Watt, the genius to whom the world is most indebted for the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... would go mad with joy. I have had strength to endure misfortunes, but perhaps the rapture of freedom may be fatal. My God! my God! if I should lose my senses! if the light of the sun should scorch my brain! if the hum of the busy ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... Century, are to be heard. What has become of Semiramide, La Cenerentola, and the others? There are no singers to sing them and so they have been dropped from the repertory without being missed. Can any of our young misses hum Di Tanti Palpiti? You know they cannot. I doubt if you can find two girls in New York (and I mean girls with a musical education) who can tell you in what opera the air belongs and yet in the early Twenties this tune was as popular as Un Bel ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... graduated lengths that they constituted the Negro's peculiar music Scale. The music intervals though approximating those of the Caucasian scale were not the same. At times, when in a reminiscent humor, I hum to myself some little songs of my childhood. On occasions, afterwards, I have "picked out" some of the same tunes on the piano. When I have done this I have always felt like giving its production on the piano ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... the sun, with the activity and hum of the morning, had made no great change in the relative positions of things within and without the bay. The people of le Feu-Follet had breakfasted, had got everything on board their little craft in ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... printed, so they say, in all the tongues of Christendom, and sold to the extent of fifty millions of copies. This tune occupied a warm place in my Sunday-schoolboy heart, along with other singable airs of the Moody and Sankey type, but as I hum it over in memory now, it tastes sweetish and thin. Its popularity is appalling, musically at least. Converse has written many other hymn-tunes, which have taken their place among ecclesiastical soporifics. Besides, he has recently ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... hopes of converting into customers by their eloquence. If this were resented by any act of violence, the inmates of each shop were ready to pour forth in succour; and in the words of an old song which Dr. Johnson was used to hum,— ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... cricket-ground and noisy eight, At Bagley, where the rustling bluebells come Almost before the blackbird finds a mate And overstay the swallow, and the hum Of many murmuring bees flits through the leaves, Have I lain poring on the dreamy ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... first giving thanks to the Giver of all. When not busied with other duties, the housewife pressed with measured round the treadles of the loom, as she twilled the web she was weaving; and as the shades of evening descended the sonorous hum of the spinning-wheel gave token to the young man on courtship intent that the daughter of the house was at home. From the kitchen a door opened into the best room, a cheerless sort of place only thrown open on special occasions, and not to compare ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... spray of foam that broke into sight upon the nearer edge of viewless depths far, far away. The trees, indeed, were sentinels set visibly about the limits of a camp that itself remained invisible. The awful hum and murmur of the main body in the distance passed into that still room about her with the firelight and hissing kettle. Out yonder—in the Forest further out—the thing that was ever roaring at the ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... arrived she was led to the punch-bowl. When the last one had been taught the way to that cool nook, there was a pleasant hum of voices in the room. There was still an undercurrent of difference as to the punch's merit—other than mere coolness; though Miss Eubanks now agreed with Aunt Delia that it possessed virtues not to be discerned in the first careless draught. The conversation continued to be general, to ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... over it? I wonder whether they get up in the night as the moonlight shines into the blank vacant old room, and play there solemnly with little ghostly horses, and the spirits of dolls, and tops that turn and turn but don't hum. ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Pete, plaintively, "I stick to hum so much o' the time I never git to talk to nobody nor hear the noos. But seems to me I did hear onct about him. Yes, sir, somebody sez as how Don Fernandez lives in a palace in that wilderness jest like a king of old, with armed ree-strainers or whatever ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... few moments, there was a busy and earnest, but indistinct hum of the two children's voices, as Violet and Peony wrought together with one happy consent. Violet still seemed to be the guiding spirit, while Peony acted rather as a labourer, and brought her the snow from far and near. And ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... telegraph; and an excitement was produced such as is seen among bees when their hive has received a sudden shock. The mountain pathways became immediately alive with human beings, and noises arose like the hum of a city heard at a distance during the busiest hours of the day. In the villages immediately adjoining the place of resort, the excitement was wholly confined to youngsters and idlers, who are ever ready to seize upon novelty and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... this visit led me first to the boys' school, for Hatiheu is the university of the north islands. The hum of the lesson came out to meet us. Close by the door, where the draught blew coolest, sat the lay brother; around him, in a packed half-circle, some sixty high-coloured faces set with staring eyes; and in the background ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the sidewalks and seemed to bend beneath the weight of sunlight upon their heads and shoulders. A truck ploughed a furrow through push-carts that rolled back to the curb like a wave crested with crude yellow, red, green, and orange merchandise. She caught the hum of voices, many tongues mingling, while the odours of vegetables and fruit and human beings came faintly to her nostrils. She was looking down upon one of the busiest streets of the city that people ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... by numerous wherries, gliding pleasurably on the rippling wave; some shooting under the arches of the elegant Waterloo, and others under the spacious span of the lofty iron bridge of Southwark,—while on either side the river, Labour was on the alert, and the busy and ceaseless hum of Industry resounded far ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... camp, scrambling among the rocks with a haste that was born of nervous tension. She did not see the men again—it was needful to pick a path down the steep descent very carefully—and when she came, breathless, upon the clump of birches among which the tents were pitched it was evident from the hum of voices that the strangers had already arrived. Pushing in among the trees, she stopped, with her heart beating unpleasantly fast, ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... he rises 'midst the twilight path, Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum: Now teach me, maid composed, 15 To ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... fears to Lin and that worthy was quite ingenious in quizzing the boy. She questioned Alfred as to his intentions. "I tole yer mother ye wouldn't run off with thet ole show while yer pap wus away from hum. Mary sed 'They mout coax ye off.' Did they coax ye? Did they offer to gin ye a job?" And she looked at Alfred very ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... she, as the men came into the yard, 'I want ye t' look at this boy. Did ye ever see such a cunnin' little critter? Jes' look at them bright eyes!' and then she held me to her breast and nearly smothered me and began to hum a ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... warm drops;— while this lovely rain was washing all the air clean from the motes, and the bad odors, and the poison-seeds that had escaped from their prisons during the long drought;—while it fell, splashing and sparkling, with a hum, and a rush, and a soft clashing—but stop! I am stealing, I find, and not that only, but with clumsy ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... the straps that bound them to their machines, the army aviators leaped lightly from their seats. The big propellers, from which the power had been cut off, as the birdmen started to volplane to the ground, ceased revolving, and the hum and roar of the powerful ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... and, to speak my mind plainly, I believe that you are an arrant, bamboozling hum-bug!" cried Tom. "No ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... wife ... and a daughter ... very beautiful daughter ... hum—hum. Many men wanted her ... wouldn't have them ... can't take her by force ... very strong. Thought of taking her to wife myself ... hum—hum. But she is too strong for ...
— Eskimo Folktales • Unknown
... noises had died away in the direction of the mill; there was no leisure for stags to bray, as they crouched now far away in the bracken, listening large-eyed and trumpet-eared for the sounds of pursuit; only the hum of insect life in the hot evening sunshine filled the air; and Ralph began to fall asleep, his back against ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... chattering gayly in a low, melodious tone with each other, and with the gentlemen of the party filling the room with a musical hum of many happy voices. ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... I ever tell 'ee, bor, about t' new squoire o' these parts—him wot cum hum yesterday from furren lands? Gaffer ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... a trumpet, little Micky got a drum, Matsy got a spinning top, you ought to hear it hum, Clarissa got a candy cane, oh, won't we have the fun, When ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... the mere neck of a bottle and the glass of a bird-cage. At the period just named, however, it found everything so exquisitely charming. It was again among flowers and verdure, again surrounded by joy and festivity; it again heard singing and musical instruments, and the hum and buzz of a crowd of people, especially from that part of the gardens which were most brilliantly illuminated. It had a good situation itself, and stood there useful and happy, bearing its appointed light. During such a pleasant time it forgot the twenty ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... which runs out from the heart of the city to string these towns together, is paved with brick, and its traffic, for the most part, is the great tin-tired dump-carts of the quarries and steel interurban electric cars, which hum so heavily that even the windows of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... gloomily approached the door of the room in which he had spent last evening, he heard a little rustle and commotion not quite consistent with his expectations—a hum of voices and soft stir such as youthful womankind only makes. Then a voice entirely strange to him uttered an exclamation. Involuntarily he started and changed his aspect. He did not know the voice, but it was young, sweet, peculiar. The cloud lightened ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... a few lines in the press of business to tell you I am well, but very lonely, with a view out over the green, in this dull, rainy weather, while the bumble-bees hum and the sparrows twitter. Grand audience tomorrow. It's vexatious that I have to buy linen, towels, table-cloths, and sheets. * * * Farewell. Hearty love, and write! ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... of a few soldiers traversing the square drew the eyes of all in their direction, and caused a brief pause in the hum of conversation. Our friends, the captives, were in the midst of these soldiers, and beside them marched the negro interpreter whom they had first met with ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... loved to creep from amid the Roman pikes to lie beneath this great vine, and see the smiling and serene shapes go by, woven from the finest fibres of all the elements. I knew not why, at that time,—but I loved to get away from the hum of the forum, and the mailed clang of Roman speech, to these shifting shows of nature, these Gods and Nymphs born of the sunbeam, the wave, the ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... forms the principal attraction: if it serve to call a crowd together, that is sufficient for their purpose; and it is for this reason, we imagine, that the effect of the whole is contrived to resemble, as it very closely does, the hum and jangle of Greenwich Fair when heard of an Easter Monday from the summit of the Observatory Hill. No, the main attraction is essentially dramatic. In front of the great chest of heterogeneous sounds there is a stage about five or six feet in width, four in height, and perhaps eighteen ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... beside the hill; A bee-hive's hum shall soothe my ear; A willowy brook, that turns a mill, With many ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... two princes to think about, and poor Cinderella, on that occasion, had not even one. Fanny did n't seem inclined to talk much, and Tom would go on in such a ridiculous manner that Polly told him she would n't listen and began to hum bits of the opera. But she heard every word, nevertheless, and resolved to pay him for his impertinence as soon as possible by showing him ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... sun like a white cloud, and when they swoop downwards to the ground the air vibrates with the hum of whirling wings. They have a trick of sitting along the coping tiles of the roof in single file like a company of soldiers drawn up in line, and on one occasion I saw some hundreds resting so closely together in this fashion that there was not room for a sparrow between them the whole length ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... moon, Jupiter and Venus. The sound of the sea distinctly heard on the tops of the hills, which we could never hear in summer. We attribute this partly to the bareness of the trees, but chiefly to the absence of the singing birds, the hum of insects, that noiseless noise which lives in the summer air. The villages marked out by beautiful beds of smoke. The turf ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... panegyrists and bards, the king proceeded towards the city called after the elephant. The progress, O mighty-armed one, of king Yudhishthira, became so beautiful that its like had never been on earth. Teeming with healthy and cheerful men, the busy hum of innumerable voices was heard there. During the progress of Pritha's son, the city and its streets were adorned with gay citizens (all of whom had come out for honouring the king). The spot through which the king passed had been decked with festoons ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... can we drink in the sense of such solitude and immensity; realizing to the full what indeed these words may mean, he may wander for hours without encountering a soul, very few birds are heard by the way, but the hum of the insect world, that dreamy go-between, hardly silence, hardly to be called noise, keeps us perpetual company, and our eyes must ever be open for beautiful little living things. Now a green and gold lizard flashes across a bit ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... and the rattle of a steamer's winch. The sounds appealed to him. They suggested organized activity, the stir of busy life; and it was pleasant to hear them after the silence of the bush. The gleam of snowy linen, dainty glass and silver caught his eye; and the hum of careless voices and the light laughter ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... nearer to the city, see its flashing lights, and hear its hum of voices, other and less doleful ideas come uppermost, leading ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... called in a loud voice; there was a hum of excitement, then a silence of expectation, and the plaintiff's counsel rose to address ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... was not for him to mix with these outsiders, these curiosity seekers. He crossed the lawn to the house, and mounted the steps. In the doorway was big Steve, while groups of men stood about in the hall, the hum of busy purposeless talk pervading the place. The judge frowned. ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... the natural instincts of my ladyhood; and pale and trembling to a degree I would not have wished seen by either of these two mysterious men, I sat in a dream of suspense, hearing and not hearing the low hum of their voices as they reasoned with or consoled the mother, now fast drifting away ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... hate new-fashioned toys Began to look extremely glum; They said that rattles were made for boys, And vowed that his buzzing was all a hum. ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... A low hum in the theatre awakened the queen from her reveries; she raised herself up and leaned forward, to see what was going on. Her glance, which was directed to the stage, fell upon the singer Clairval, who was just then beginning to give, with his ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... Normandy. Madame herself remained almost entirely invisible, shut up in the sanctity of her own rooms; and so the whole house had a sense of stillness that seemed only heightened by the glory of the autumn sunshine, and the hum of bees and rustle of leaves that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... his long, thin hands together, he looked round the deserted supper-room, whence even the last flunkey had retired in order to join his friends in the hall below. All was silence in the dimly-lighted room, whilst the sound of the gavotte, the hum of distant talk and laughter, and the rumble of an occasional coach outside, only seemed to reach this palace of the Sleeping Beauty as the murmur of ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... it, and then it seemed to him that everything was alive and watching him in the same intent way—the passion-flowers, the green leaves, the grass, the trees, the wide sky, the great shining sun. He listened, and there was no sound in the wood, not even the hum of a fly or wild bee, and it was so still that not a leaf moved. Finally he moved away from that spot, but treading very softly, and holding his breath to listen, for it seemed to him that the forest had something to tell him, and that if he listened he would hear ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... to your hill and dale, Yet take in your hand from me A staff when your footsteps fail, A weapon if need there be; 'Twill hum in your ear when the foeman's near, athirst for ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... away Far from the ocean's pebbly shore, Still loves to hum the choral lay, The whispering mermaid ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... midsummer, and the quiet, little town of Overton drowsed gently, not to awaken until the sounds of girl laughter and the passing of light feet through its sleepy streets roused it to the realization that it was Overton College that made its hum-drum ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... reflected in the mirrors between the deep windows, and the moths and June-bugs tilting at the lights. We sat at a little mahogany table eating porridge and cream from round blue bowls, with Mammy to wait on us. Sometimes there floated in upon us the hum of revelry from the great drawing-room where Madame had her company. Often the good Mr. Mason would come in to us (he cared little for the parties), and talk to us of our day's doings. Nick had his lessons from the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Graced the once sequestered hillside. By and by the streets were fashioned From the model of McAdam, And adorned the youthful city. Richmond, Mulberry, and Paulding, Danville, Lexington, and Water, Stanford, Campbell, and Crab Orchard, Were the windings of the city. And the noisy hum of traffic, And the roll of cart and carriage, Told of barter and of bargain, Told of human gains and losses, Scared away the beasts and birdlings, Locked and dammed and bridged the rivers, Chained the rolling streams and rivers. Schools were opened, where the people ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... smiled at the generosity of his introduction. He greeted us all cordially and cheerfully, and the light fading rapidly, we rowed on in the early starlight. The gondolas slid side by side, and there was a constant hum ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... a phantom army come, With never a sound of fife or drum, But keeping time to a throbbing hum Of wailing and lamentation: The martyred heroes of Malvern Hill, Of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, The men whose wasted figures fill The patriot ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... Lord, we rejoice that we are Thy making, though Thy handiwork is not very clear in our outer man as yet. We bless Thee that we feel Thy hand making us. What if it be in pain! Evermore we hear the voice of the potter above the hum and grind of his wheel. Father, Thou only knowest how we love Thee. Fashion the clay to Thy beautiful will. To the eyes of men we are vessels of dishonor, but we know Thou dost not despise us, for Thou hast made us, and Thou dwellest with us. Thou hast made ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... more hostile. More than a few ears were tingling; at every turn there were scowls and sullen eyes and ugly smiles. The matrons' cheeks were burning; their eyes flashed; every now and again one of their voices shrilled defiantly above the hoarse hum of the crowd. The young Irish girls were laughing, enjoying the excitement, and admiring the young men flaunting their banknotes with the swing of their father's shillalahs. The young German girls curled their lips and whispered together. There was a significant herding of the contending ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... light, And day's last vestige takes its silent flight. No more is heard the woodman's measured stroke, Which with the dawn from yonder dingle broke; No more, hoarse clamouring o'er the uplifted head, The crows assembling seek their wind-rock'd bed; Still'd is the village hum—the woodland sounds Have ceased to echo o'er the dewy grounds, And general silence reigns, save when below The murmuring Trent is scarcely heard to flow; And save when, swung by 'nighted rustic late, Oft, on its hinge, rebounds the jarring gate; Or when the sheep-bell, ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... circles ... perhaps not accustomed ... bit rough in speech, but heart of gold ... give you the shirt right off her back ... hum ... manner of speaking ... know what ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... all very different, strikingly different, from his forecastings. A young woman was at the piano, with a young man whose clothes fitted him and who was in nowise conscious of them, turning the music for her. There was a pleasant hum of conversation; the lights were not glaring; the furnishings were not in bad taste—on the contrary, they were in exceedingly good taste. Griswold smiled when he remembered that he had been looking forward ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... yield of our harvest are the two poles upon which revolves the credit of our country abroad. But the growing value of the West to the economic and national life of Canada is a mere shadow of its increasing importance in the religious world. Above the hum of the binders and loud clatter of the threshing machines, above the sharp voice of the shrieking steel rail, counting, as it were, one by one, the freighted cars on their way to the Eastern ports, above the clamor of commerce and ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... Bug," said the Goblin, calmly. "When a cab-horse on a vacation talks about eating you, a Hum Bug is a pretty good thing to take the conceit out of him. They're loaded, you see, and they go booming along as innocently as you please; but if you touch 'em—why, 'There you aren't!' ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... masses of infantry lay waiting their turn to cross. The guns of batteries gleamed in the sun, endless wagon-trains and ambulances moved or were at rest. Here and there the wind of morning fluttered the flags and guidons with flashes of colour. The hum of a great army, the multitudinous murmurs of men talking, the crack of whips, the sharp rattle of wagons and of moving artillery, made a strange orchestra. Over all rose the warning shrieks of the gun-boat signals. Far or near on the fertile meadows the ripened corn ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... her soft cheek unrebuked, and followed my father through the dark with a happy heart Mechanically, rather than from either devotion or defiance, I began to hum "Chantez de Dieu," when my father's warning hand plucked my sleeve, and, at the same instant, a rough voice beside me said, "Hold your peace! Have you not heard of the arret?" ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... There was an agreeable hum of chatter from these early comers when I found myself welcoming Mrs. Judge Ballard and half a dozen members of the Onwards and Upwards Club, all of them wearing what I made out to be a baffled look. From these I presently managed ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... me was empty, and the man on my right had fallen forwards, his hand pressed to his side, his face curiously livid, patchy with streaks of dark colour, his eyes bulbous. Waiters still hurried to and fro, the hum of conversation was uninterrupted. And then suddenly it came—a cry of breathless horror, of mortal unexpected agony—a cry, it seemed, of death. The waiters stopped in their places to gaze breathlessly at the spot from which the ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... we could hear the sound of Tim Curtin's fiddle, and the hum of voices coming from the interior of the building. Our fear was that any of the inmates of the neighbouring dens might be awake, and, catching sight of us, might give the alarm, and allow the men time to ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... humming habit either to cover their confusion, or as a sign of light-heartedness and contentment. Prominent amongst these are Pecksniff, who, like Morfin, hums melodiously, and Micawber, who can both sing and hum. Nor must we omit to mention Miss Petowker, who 'hummed a tune' as her contribution to the entertainment at Mrs. Kenwigs' party. Many of the characters resort to humming to conceal their temporary discomfiture, and ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... is told how the herdsman with Cypris—Get thee to Ida, get thee to Anchises! There are oak trees—here only galingale blows, here sweetly hum the bees ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... ye a piece: ye'll aiblins un'erstan' that!" said Donal, as he turned to leave the corn for the grass, where Hornie was eating with the rest like the most innocent of hum'le (hornless) animals. Gibbie obeyed, and followed, as, with slow step and downbent face, Donal led the way. For he had tucked his club under his arm, and already his greedy eyes were fixed on the book he had carried all the time, nor did he take them from it until, followed in full and ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... low in the grate and he did not renew it. He looked past it toward the darkened windows and heard the hum of motor cars along the boulevard below. Again he was the boy of Caxton hungrily seeking an end in life. The flushed face of the woman in the theatre danced before his eyes. He remembered with shame how he had, a few days ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... In the hum and drive of the wheels and the great roar around me of the Whirling Unbelief. I speak for these men—for all of us. We are not cogs and wheels. We are men. We are born again ourselves. Other men can ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... pink cording swung gently in the open windows. From the work-room came the distant hum of a sewing-machine and the sound of voices. Harriet sat with her hands in her lap and listened while Tillie poured out her story. The gates were down now. She told it all, consistently and with unconscious pathos: her little room under the roof at Mrs. McKee's, and the house in the country; ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... nine o'clock when the deputy sheriff again appeared to escort him into court, and as they entered the room North saw that it was packed to the doors. His appearance won a moment of oppressive silence, then came the shuffling of feet and the hum ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... was folks, most, but I don't care. It's somethin' or other warm enough to-day, an' I'll go home. I can set in the barn an' sort apples. That won't be a heatin' job, an' 'll give me a chance to have an eye on things. Oh, hum! I wish Monty would happen along. Strange! how I miss that worthless, stutterin', big-hearted little shaver! I wouldn't offer to take him fishin' more'n once without bein' took ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... too proud to walk, flit past noiselessly in rubber-tyred rickshaws—which are not, as many believe, an ancient and typical Oriental conveyance, but the modern invention of an English missionary called Robinson. The hum of the city is dominated by the screech of the tramcars in the principal streets and by the patter of the wooden clogs, an incessant, irritating sound like rain. But these were now ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... Then my lace-pillow;" her busy hands had stopped, as if her argument required all her cheerful earnestness, but now went on again at the name; "it goes with my thoughts when I think, and it goes with my tunes when I hum any, and that's not work. Why, you yourself thought it was music, you know, sir. And so ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... Groves which thy youth has known thine age shall know; Here, as of old, Hyblaean bees shall twine Their mazy murmur into dreams of thine,— Still from the hedge's willow-bloom shall come Through summer silences a slumberous hum,— Still from the crag shall lingering winds prolong The half-heard cadence of the woodman's song,— While evermore the doves, thy love and care, Fill the tall elms with sighing ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... just a repetition of yesterday's, with the stumps and the mud holes rather worse. The 'Corner' with its single sawmill and store, offered no inducement for a halt; and a tedious two miles farther brought them to 'hum.' ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... days in the week Geneva presents a cheerful and animated appearance. On every hand are heard the sounds of honest toil and the hum of busy trade. Farmers from the surrounding country come in numbers into the village to purchase their necessary supplies and to listen to the news and gossip of the day, and the numerous stores transact a thriving business and reap a handsome ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... than the noise of mowing-machine hum, as the machines which make it are more delicate and more curious. Madam How is a very skilful workwoman, and has eyes which see deeper and clearer than all microscopes; as you would find, if you tried to see what makes that "Midsummer ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... approaching the end; they had been at their work for near three hours, the 5,040 changes were almost finished. Westray went down from the organ-loft, and as he walked through the church the very last change was rung. Before the hum and mutter had died out of the air, and while the red-faced ringers in the belfry were quaffing their tankards, the architect had made his way to the scaffolding, and stood face to face with the zigzag crack. He looked at it carefully, as a doctor might examine ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... quadrupeds are yet in existence, and the silent forests are enlivened only by the stirring of the breeze among the trees or the occasional hum of monstrous insects. But upon the margin of yonder stream a huge four-footed creature creeps slowly along. He looks much like a gigantic salamander, and his broad, soft feet make deep impressions in ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... moment's darkness; then, like terror-struck workers rallying to their tasks, every faculty was again at its post, receiving and transmitting signals, taking observations, anticipating orders, making her brain ring with the hum ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... softened, from its power of censure, by bows or smiles—Mr. Knightley. The circumstance was told him at Hartfield; for the moment, he was silent; but Emma heard him almost immediately afterwards say to himself, over a newspaper he held in his hand, "Hum! just the trifling, silly fellow I took him for." She had half a mind to resent; but an instant's observation convinced her that it was really said only to relieve his own feelings, and not meant to provoke; and therefore she let ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... came from the other room and presented for inspection his drawing of the seamen dead in the rigging of the wreck, a company of grizzly and horrible figures, bony-fingered, shrunken and with awful eyes. " Hum," said Coleman, after a prolonged study, " that's all right. That's good, Jimmie. But you'd better work 'em up around the eyes a little more." The office boy was deploying in the distance, waiting for the correct moment to present ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... better explained than by the authors themselves, or with some striking original development, this very month. In the quiet heat of early summer, on the dusty gold morning, the music comes, louder at intervals, above the hum of voices from some neighbouring church, among the flowering trees, valued now, perhaps, only for the poetically rapt faces among priests or worshippers, or the mere skill and eloquence, it may be, of its preachers of faith and righteousness. In his ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... have been from infancy accustomed to the quiet consecrated burying places of our own land,—spots which, in rural districts, are usually retired, yet not quite removed from the reach of "the busy hum of men;" to those who have always looked upon a ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... of this threatened him, and I braced myself up to a firm determination, that, if this was so, I, out of my deep gratitude to him, would do my utmost best to warn him in time. While these thoughts possessed me, the hum of gay conversation went on, and Zara's bright laughter ever and again broke like music on the air. Father Paul, too, proved himself to be of quite a festive and jovial disposition, for he made himself agreeable to Mrs. Challoner ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... last, Kenn? Man, but I've been wearying for a sight of your honest face. I was whiles thinking you must have given us the go-by. Fegs, but it's a braw day and a sight guid for sair een to see you, lad. You will have heard how we gave Johnnie Cope his kail through his reek." He broke off to hum:— ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... The shrill hum of a mosquito explored the place and grew shriller in indignation at Woodhouse's ointment. Then the lantern went out and all ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... O Street of Ink, Where printers and machinsts swink Amid the buzz and hum and clink; By night one cannot sleep a wink, There is no time to stop or think, One half forgets to eat or drink, One's brains are knotted in a kink, One always lives upon the brink Of "happenings" that strike one pink. One ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... (1613), describing the smaller vessels of Malacca which he calls balos in ch. 13, De Embarcacoes, says: "At the poop they have two rudders, one on each side to steer with." E por poupa dos ballos, tem 2 lemes, hum en cada lado pera o governo. (Malacca, l'Inde merid. et le Cathay, Bruxelles, 1882, 4to, f. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... "Ho-hum!" yawned Tom Reade, dressed only in underclothes and trousers, as he stood in the tent doorway half an ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... How many kiom da. How much kiom da. However tamen. Howsoever tamen. Howl hundblekegi. Howitzer bombardilo. Hub (of wheel) radcentro. Hubbub bruado. Huddle kunproksimigxi. Hue (colour) nuanco. Hug cxirkauxprenegi. Huge grandega. Hum kanteti. Hum zumi. Human homa. Humane humana. Humanity humaneco. Humanity (mankind) homaro. Humble humila. Humble humiligi. Humble, to be humiligxi. Humerus humero. Humid malseka. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... bowing to another, speaking with all by turns, and wondering in his heart—if there is yet any letter from Hawkhurst. And now the hurrying tread of waiters ceases, the ring and clatter of glass and silver is hushed, the hum of talk and laughter dies away, and a mottle-faced gentleman rises, and, clutching himself by the shirt-frill with one hand, and elevating a brimming glass in the other, clears his throat, and ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... liked doing the work well enough,—for a little while. But I had quite all I wanted of it before the fortnight was over. I felt like "giving praise" when I saw her coming into the garden, looking just as good as new, and, my word for it, she made things hum yesterday. ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... of Hope',— Whate'er my employment I shall not mope— But it proves great sport for cousin Bill. (He's a youth just starting up Life's hill) But should he as old as I become He would conclude that 't is all a 'hum'." ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... 1869 Mr. Chamberlain was elected a member of the Birmingham Town Council, and he began to make things spin and hum at a pace which literally soon reached a pretty high rate. His example, and possibly his persuasion, induced several of his friends and associates to become candidates for Town Council membership, and in a very short time he had a strong and influential following, made up ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... had been, doubtless, among the last to join the sea of fires, huts, and human faces that filled the great furrow in the land between Studzianka and the fatal river, a restless living sea of almost imperceptibly moving figures, that sent up a smothered hum of sound blended with frightful shrieks. It seemed that hunger and despair had driven these forlorn creatures to take forcible possession of the carriage, for the old General and his young wife, whom they had ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... on the British front, get into noisy action. (Their name, it is said, came from a London music-hall song which was exceedingly popular at the beginning of the war. When the shells from the German A. A. guns burst harmlessly around the British airmen they would hum mockingly the concluding line of the song: "Archibald, certainly not!") Unable to keep their fliers in the air, the Germans are to all intents and purposes blind. They are unable to regulate the fire of their artillery or to direct their infantry attacks; they do ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... the world peacefully. Ah, how well she knew that to-day this temple of worship was but a den of jackals, ready to rend her if she so much as hesitated, so much as faltered in look or speech! Never should they feed themselves upon her sorrow. She went on, smiling here and there. The low hum, the pallid lights, the murmur from the organ, all seemed cruelly accented. Her pew was third from the chancel; she was but half-way through the ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... His preachers. The Holy Spirit speaks to us through these preachers like the wind breathing through the pipes of a great organ. To those who have ears to hear, the roar of the ocean, or the sound of the mighty rushing wind, are as an anthem of praise. The song of birds, the hum of insects, every voice in the world of Nature combine to take part in a hymn of thanksgiving, a great Benedicite, and to sing, "O all ye works of the Lord bless ye the Lord, praise Him, and magnify Him for ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... was the means of labor so firmly established that one-fifth of the inhabitants were black. By contrast, the Northern States were still concerned with commerce as the very lifeblood of their existence. New England had not dreamed of the millions of spindles which should hum on the banks of her rivers and lure her young men and women from the farms to the clamorous factory towns. The city of New York had not yet outgrown its traffic in furs and its magnificent commercial destiny was still unrevealed. It ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... streets, crossing and recrossing one another; they glowed and blazed against masses of buildings, and they hung at enormous heights in mid-air here and there, apparently without any support. Everywhere was the glow and dazzle of their brilliancy of light, with the distant bee hum of a nearing elevated train, at intervals gradually deepening into a roar. The river looked miles below them, and craft with sparks or blaze of light went slowly ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of untidy Gothic facades and gaunt unfinished church walls; and as I walked, I was in the Close of Salisbury on a perfumed summer afternoon. The drowsy scent of lime-flowers and mignonette, the cawing of elm-cradled rooks, the hum of bees above, the velvet touch of smooth-shorn grass, and the breathless shadow of motionless green boughs made up one potent and absorbing mood of the charmed senses. Far overhead soared the calm grey spire into the infinite air, and the perfection of accomplished beauty slept beneath in those ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... whole figure notwithstanding. It was also pleasant to prove by mathematics, and verify by experiment, that the angular velocity of a reflected beam is twice that of the mirror which reflects it. From the hum of a bee we were able to determine the number of times the insect flaps its wings in a second. Following up our researches upon the pendulum, we learned how Colonel Sabine had made it the means of determining the figure of the earth; and we were also startled by the inference which the pendulum ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Sunday repose prevailed the whole moribund town, peaceful, profound. A certain pleasing numbness, a sense of grateful enervation exhaled from the scorching plaster. There was no movement, no sound of human business. The faint hum of the insect, the intermittent murmur of the guitar, the mellow complainings of the pigeons, the prolonged purr of the white cat, the contented clucking of the hens—all these noises mingled together to form a faint, drowsy bourdon, prolonged, stupefying, suggestive of an infinite quiet, of ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... small and as low, but its walls consisted of boards. A window of four panes admitted the light, and a chimney of brick, well burnt and neatly arranged, peeped over the roof. As I approached, I heard the voice of children and the hum of a spinning-wheel. ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... many miles around With his gay song re-echo and resound; Or, pausing, marks the sweet, melodious lay The nightingale at stilly night doth lay; Or listens to the morn or evening praise, As the wild warblers blended chorus raise, The hum of bee, as duty it fulfils, The rippling stream that sports among the hills, The constant murmur of the mighty seas, Or pensive sighing of the Summer breeze, Which, rambling, rustles through the leafy ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... the clutch at high speed and the car bounded over the road, gradually increasing its pace until the hum of the engine almost drowned out all speech. The girls asked no questions. They knew that, by following the river road along the placid Lumano for some distance, they could take a fork toward the railway and reach Applegate Crossing much quicker ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... promised to marry me, I was at one sort of fever-pitch, and when I got to work on that play I was at another. No writer while exercising an abnormal faculty is quite sane. His brain is several pitches above normal and his nerves are like hot taut wires—that hum like the devil. If this were not the case he would not be an imaginative writer at all. But he certainly is in no condition to reveal himself to a woman. I have made wild and sporadic love to you—sporadic is the ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... deserted. Boxes and bales of goods lay untouched on the wharves; the cheering cries with which the workmen formerly animated their labour were hushed. There was no sound of creaking cords, no rattle of heavy chains—none of the busy hum ordinarily attending the discharge of freight from a vessel, or the packing of goods and stores on board. All traffic was at an end; and this scene, usually one of the liveliest possible, was now forlorn and desolate. On the opposite ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Through the hum of conversation and capricious laughter, Vanya's vague music drifted like wind-blown thistle-down, and his absent regard never left Marya, where she rested among the cushions in low-voiced dialogue ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... heart and home. Here a gate is opened by the Mediator's hand, and no man can shut it, until the angel shall proclaim that time shall be no more. Here resounds a voice clear, human, memorable—a voice that all the hum of the world cannot drown, proclaiming to the lowest, furthest outcasts, and to the latest generations, "Whosoever ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... cast a damper on his enthusiasm by exclaiming, in a pet, "Oh! dumn your singing! keep quiet, and pull away!" This we now did, in the most uninteresting silence; until, with a jerk that made every elbow hum, the root dragged out; and most inelegantly, we all landed upon the ground. The doctor, quite exhausted, stayed there; and, deluded into believing that, after so doughty a performance, we would be allowed a cessation of toil, took off ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... the depths of heaven; and his eyes fell over the broad expanse below. Dim in the silenced port of the city rose the masts of the galleys; along that mart of luxury and of labor was stilled the mighty hum. No lights, save here and there from before the columns of a temple, or in the porticoes of the voiceless forum, broke the wan and fluctuating light of the struggling morn. From the heart of the torpid city, so soon to vibrate with a thousand passions, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... any more, except that people have no right to falsify the Bible! I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and passionate song!" Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... seventeen hundred and fifty nine, When Hawke came swooping from the West, The French King's Admiral with twenty of the line, Was sailing forth, to sack us, out of Brest. The ports of France were crowded, the quays of France a-hum With thirty thousand soldiers marching to the drum, For bragging time was over and fighting time was come When Hawke came ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... you've changed a great deal; yes, bless my soul you have, but it's very becoming, it is indeed. Now come right in and sit down, and let me look at you, for I'd like to do so, yes I would. There—hum! ha, I never expected to get this close to you and be safe. And you called me Uncle Ridley too. Do ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... what to do, and announced that he would at once cross the boundary and go himself to the nearest Transvaal town to demand redress. There was a hum of approval, with a sharp enquiry from Montsioa,—did he really mean to go himself? "Having no one to send, I must go myself," Mackenzie replied. The old Chief, in a generous way, half dissuaded him from the attempt. "The Boers ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... band was playing dance music ... one of those rousing, splendidly accented Viennese waltzes. There seemed to be a ball on, for through the open door of the room, I heard, mingled with the strains of the music, the sound of feet and the hum of voices. ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... the blow would be a master stroke. They were received everywhere with joy and approval. The tomahawks were dug up, the war dances were danced, the war songs sung, and the men began to paint their faces and bodies for battle. A hum and a murmur ran through the northwestern forests, the hum and murmur of preparation and hope. Only the five, on their little island in the lake, yet heard this hum and murmur, so ominous to the border, but they were ready to carry the message through the ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... free song, The hum of bees, the notes of birds, And make an anthem sweet and strong Of ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... upon some rolled blankets. He was smoking, and meditating over the remains of a small fire. Bill was stretched full-length upon the ground. His philosophic temperament seemed to render him impervious to the attacking hordes of mosquitoes. Beyond the hum of the flying pestilence the place ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... to speak to the Sergeant, and in so doing showed my back to the ladies. The hum of comment deepened into surprise, that half stopped ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... felt, when they obtained the command of a company, that they were entitled to receive the greatest deference from the peaceful occupants of the soil. Any one of our readers who has occasion to cross the Niagara may easily observe not only the self importance, but the real estimation enjoyed by the hum blest representative of the crown, even in that polar region of royal sunshine. Such, and at no very distant period, was the respect paid to the military in these States, where now, happily, no symbol of war is ever seen, unless at the ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... thought or expression of it somewhere or another—before they were born perhaps—and that of cutting up, and making picture-frames round all your and my false quantities, and other monstrosities. Why, Tom, you wouldn't be so cruel as never to let old Momus hum over the 'O genus humanum' again, and then look up doubtingly through his spectacles, and end by smiling and giving three extra marks for it—just for old sake's sake, ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... restlessly; the movement sent the snake-feeders skimming. The hum of life swelled and roared in his strained ears. Small turtles, that had climbed on a log to sun, splashed clumsily into the water. Somewhere in the timber of the bridge a bloodthirsty little frog cried ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... it by mother, by father, and by servants, and it was one of the first things she herself learned. There was music in the race, and this bright little one had her full share of it, and soon could hum her parent's triumphal march, the talisman of her family, ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... by distance into tawny velvet, seeming only the more spacious because of the straight, thin lines of barbed-wire fences lined with goldenrod, and solitary houses in willow groves. The dips and curves of the rolling plain drew him on; the distances satisfied his eyes. A pleasant hum of insects filled the land's ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... a hasty toilet, and started for the dining-room to get some sort of a lunch to do him until dinner time. As he stepped from the door of the office he caught sight of two men hurrying from the cook camp to the men's camp. He thought he heard the hum of conversation in the latter building. The cookee set hot coffee before him. For the rest, he took what he could find cold ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... away fur a week, and he won't be hum before the fust of August, no how," said the woman resolutely, and adopting Tom's suggestion ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... summer evening waiting for her husband. She cannot see him often; he has yet the work to do which he calls just and holy. But he is coming now. It is very quiet; she can hear her own heart beat slow and full; the warm air holds moveless the delicate scent of the clover; the bees hum her a drowsy good-night, as they pass; the locusts in the lindens have just begun to sing themselves to sleep; but the glowless crimson in the West holds her thought the longest. She loves, understands color: it speaks to her of the Day waiting just behind this. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... it that we are to have a superb fleet built almost immediately); I observe the crews prospectively; they are constituted of various nationalities, not necessarily American; I see them sling the slug and chew the plug; I hear the drum begin to hum; ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... see San Giorgio by the light reflected on it from the Piazzetta. The same light climbs the Campanile of S. Mark, and shows the golden angel in mystery of gloom. The only noise that reaches us is a confused hum from the Piazza. Sitting and musing there, the blackness of the water whispers in our ears a tale of death. And now we hear a plash of oars and gliding through the darkness comes a single boat. One man leaps upon ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... of the earth. And, as a sign and instrument of this, I would point to some District School-house; rough, weather-worn, standing in some bleak corner of New York or New Hampshire; through whose closed windows the passer-by catches the confused hum of recitation, or at whose door he sees children of all conditions mingling in motley play. Of all conditions, so far as external peculiarities go; for the laws of nature and the ordinances of Providence cannot be dispensed with even here; but of ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... one of the folding-doors in the lobby, and in a stentorian voice shouted some word, which Ellerey did not catch. Its effect was magical. Immediately there arose a loud hum of voices, the clinking and clatter of innumerable glasses and plates, and the rattle of dice and dominoes. Then Theodor let the door swing to again, muffling the sounds of this living hive, and led the way into a small ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... ever witnessed the swarming of bees? Have you ever heard the hum and buzz of them? So looked and sounded the bazaars that night. At every intersection of streets and passages there were groups, buzzing and gesticulating. In the gutters the cocoanut oil lamps flickered, throwing weird shadows upon the walls; ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... irresistible rushes after heavy rains, sweeping all before them, including not seldom the sheep, and even the homestead, of the incautious or inexperienced settler. I have a striking contrast in store when I revisit those plains, which now resound to the traffic of road and railway, and to the busy hum of many towns and villages and of ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... thought of it then! I was tired of hum-drum life, and I wanted to see adventures!" ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... nervous tension. She did not see the men again—it was needful to pick a path down the steep descent very carefully—and when she came, breathless, upon the clump of birches among which the tents were pitched it was evident from the hum of voices that the strangers had already arrived. Pushing in among the trees, she stopped, with her heart beating unpleasantly fast, ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... roads branching off in several directions, and sometimes Mr. Sesemann doubted if he had taken the right path. But not a soul was near, and no sound could be heard except the rustling of the wind and the hum of little insects. A merry little bird was singing on a larch-tree, ...
— Heidi - (Gift Edition) • Johanna Spyri
... of effect. The multitude filling the great aisles seems ruled and subdued by some invisible influence. Amongst the thirty thousand souls that peopled it the day I was there, not one loud noise was to be heard, not one irregular movement seen—the living tide rolls on quietly, with a deep hum like the sea ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... looking out over the similitude of a May grove (with little brick in it, and only the minarets of Westminster and gilt cross of St. Paul's visible in the distance, and the enormous roar of London softened into an enormous hum), endeavor to await what will betide. I am busy with Luther in one Marheinecke's very long- winded Book. I think of innumerable things; steal out westward at sunset among the Kensington lanes; would this May weather ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... "A hum of business and everyday work surrounded the place, and it seemed refreshing to note the stir and bustle of affairs. Streams of people were entering the Court as we arrived. They were inhabitants ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... proven its superiority to any of the seventeen cars which he at present maintained in his establishment. He had got three of these new cars, and while Montague sat upon the quarter-deck of the Triton and gazed at the magnificent scenery of the river, he had in his ear the monotonous hum of Devon's voice, discussing annular ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... toss up the ball, And spin the hum top; We'll have a grand frolic to-day; Let's make some soap bubbles, And blow them up high, And see what the baby will say. Rad-er-er too tan-da-ro te ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... little story follows as to the preciseness of the Commandant and Mr. O'Rorke continues: "It is pleasant to add that this new Commandant was in one respect just the man that was needed. From the first day he began to make the place hum, the foul clean, and in time rendered it habitable. Had there been any, he would have made the dust fly, but there was not. Indeed the court was at first almost a bog through which we threaded our way inch deep in mud, and hopped over the pools. All this ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... line, But with a sigh I wish it mine; When he can in one couplet fix More sense than I can do in six; It gives me such a jealous fit, I cry, "Pox take him and his wit!" [4]I grieve to be outdone by Gay In my own hum'rous biting way. Arbuthnot is no more my friend, Who dares to irony pretend, Which I was born to introduce, Refin'd it first, and shew'd its use. St. John, as well as Pultney, knows That I had some repute for prose; ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... "Ho, hum!" old Mr. Crow yawned. He had stopped to talk with Turkey Proudfoot in the cornfield. It was fall; and the shocks of corn stood on every hand like great fat scarecrows, with fat yellow pumpkins lying at their feet, as if the scarecrows' heads had ...
— The Tale of Turkey Proudfoot - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... Moore has vexed me much. He is our soprano, and has a clear, high-tenor voice and often sings solos in public, but for some unexplainable reason he would not sing a note in church unless I sang with him, so I had to hum along for the man's ear alone. Why he has been so frightened' I do not know, unless it was the unusual condition of things, which have been quite ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... door she heard the hum of a sewing-machine. It made her heart sink, so clearly did it ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... moment, a startled hum was heard from the crowd, and the press moved and swayed for an instant, as if a sort of spasm had ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... dragged her to the car. Strangwise had the door open and between them they thrust her in. Bellward and the woman mounted after her while Strangwise, after starting the engine, sprang into the driving-seat outside. With a low hum the big car glided forth into the ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... in the bygone times of summer; and now old Mackenzie had got on a bit farther in his musical studies, and could hum ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... I in truth!" And herewith Sir Palamon fell to an attitude of thought with eyes ecstatic, with knitted brows and sage nodding of the head. "Love, my lady—ha! Love, lady is—hum! Love, then, perceive me, is of its nature elemental, being of the elements, as 'twere, composed and composite, as water, air and fire. For, remark me, there is no love but begetteth first water, which is tears; ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... books!!!" And they came. Not to come meant "war and rumors of war." The backless benches, high above the floor, groaned under the weight of irrepressible young America; the multitude of mischievous, shining faces, the bare legs and feet, swinging to and fro, and the mingled hum of happy voices, spelling aloud life's first lessons, prophesied the future glory of the State. The curriculum of the old field school was the same everywhere—one Webster's blue backed, elementary spelling ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... in my path, or sit in the shadow of our noble ash-trees by the water-side, with their branches gently swaying in the light summer breeze that murmurs through their feathery foliage—my ears full of that low music mingled with the dreamy hum of insects, my eyes abstractedly gazing on the glassy surface of the little lake before me, with the trees that crowd about its bank, some gracefully bending to kiss its waters, some rearing their stately heads ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... to hum," said Obed, cheerily. "Here, drop the packs over in this corner. If later on so be yuh want to git anything out o' the same it'll be easy done. And seein' as I've got dinner started, I guess we wont take a turn around the farm till it's been ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... more had left the table, but the rest, lingering over their fresh filled coffee cups, sat around telling tales, and Tex Calder was among them. He was about to push back his chair when the hum of talk ceased as if at a command. The men on the opposite side of the table were staring with fascinated eyes at the door, and then a big voice boomed behind him: "Tex Calder, stan' up. You've come to the ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... 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 musick Would make both me and you sick, And much ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... exercise of leaping water-falls and forging up boiling rapids had developed these sturdy mountaineer trout into prodigies of strength and endurance. Even now my nerves tingle to the tips of my toes as in fancy I hear my reel hum or see the tip of my five ounce split bamboo bend so as to ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... summer. It made her think of rounders in the hot school garden, singing-classes in the large green room, all the class shouting "Gather roses while ye may," hot afternoons in the shady north room, the sound of turning pages, the hum of the garden beyond the sun-blinds, meetings in the sixth form study.... Lilla, with her black hair and the specks of bright amber in the brown of her eyes, ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... seemed to speak as often a man deep in thought will hum a tune "sometimes I have felt before what I feel now a current in the universe that sets against me, against us. Something pulls the other way. It has all but daunted me ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... said, "Hum," and "Hoity, Toit! A book is not a building block, a cushion or a quoit. Soil your books and spoil your books? Is that the thing to do? Gammon, sir! and Spinach, sir! And Fiddle-faddle, too!" He blinked so quick, and thumped his stick, then gave me ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... place which might be in the hands of an enemy. Her boat was tied at the dock. She had the half-ruined distillery yet to pass. It had stood under the cliff her lifetime. As she drew nearer, cracks of light and a hum like the droning of a beehive magically turned the old distillery into a caravansary ...
— Marianson - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... brought in again and stood before his judges amid a hum of sympathy from the spectators which conveyed the news of his acquittal to him. He was another man. His features had lost their harshness, his lips were relaxed again. He looked venerable; his face bore the impression of innocence. The President read out in tones of emotion ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... the embrace of the earth. The grass stood high above me, and the shadows of the tree-branches danced on my face. I looked up at the sky, with halfclosed eyes to bear the dazzling light. Bees buzzed over me, sometimes a butterfly passed, there was a hum in the air, greenfinches sang in the hedge. Gradually entering into the intense life of the summer days—a life which burned around as if every grass blade and leaf were a torch—I came to feel ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... agree with you," the general barked; "at the same time...." Their voices sounded on, intermingling, indistinguishable, soothing even. I seemed to be listening to the hum of a threshing-machine—a passage of sound booming on one note, a passage, a half-tone higher, and so on, and so on. Visible things grew hazy, fused ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... young Englishmen—all gather in a motley crowd; and the British bookmaker's interesting presence is obtrusive. His very accent—strident, coarse, impudent, unspeakably low—gives a kind of ground-note to the hum of talk that rises in all places of public resort, and he recruits his delicate health in anticipation of the time when he will be able to howl ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... do you charge?" asked Joshua. "I feel kind of hungry, and I haven't ate an orange for an age. Last time I bought one was at the grocery up to hum." ...
— The Erie Train Boy • Horatio Alger
... a hum of an aeroplane overhead and then a series of explosions, like those of a heavy gun. Flashes were seen in the direction of a French town where there were great steel works and we drove home that way. The inhabitants of the country and the hamlets along the road were all out of ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... Forrest's surmise that we had happened once more upon the handiwork of the Motor Pirate was correct. He had, it appeared, been driving quietly along, when his attention had been arrested by the curious high-toned hum which presaged the Pirate's approach. He was wondering what the curious noise could be, when he suddenly realized that a long low car was beside him. He did not anticipate any harm either to himself or to his charge, ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... who can put his hand in that of dear mother Nature, and learn his first baby lessons without any meddlesome middleman; who is cradled in sweet sounds "from early morn to dewy eve," lulled to his morning nap by hum of crickets and bees, and to his night's slumber by the sighing of the wind, the plash of waves, or the ripple of a river. He is a part of the "shining web of creation," learning to spell out the universe ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... just this moment, when sitting In the glare of the grand chandelier,— In the bustle and glitter befitting The "finest soiree of the year,"— In the mists of a gaze de Chambery, And the hum of the smallest of talk,— Somehow, Joe, I thought of the "Ferry," And the dance that we had ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... career hitherto.... Our State is a marvel to ourselves, and a miracle to the rest of the world. Nor is the influence of California confined within her own borders.... The islands nestled in the embrace of the Pacific have felt the quickening breath of her enterprise.... She has caused the hum of busy life to be heard in the wilderness where rolls the Oregon, and where until recently was heard no sound save his own dashings. Even the wall of Chinese exclusiveness has been broken down, and the children of the ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... that craft,' her ladyship acquiesced. 'Beranger—let me see—your favourite Frenchman, Franks, wasn't it his father?—no, his grandfather. "Mon pauvre et humble grand-pyre," I think, was a tailor. Hum! the degrees of the thing, I confess, don't affect me. One trade I imagine to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... I transplant them, and I treasure them like gold. One cluster bears light-coloured bloom; another bears dark shades. I sit with head uncovered by the sparse-leaved artemesia hedge, And in their pure and cool fragrance, clasping my knees, I hum my lays. In the whole world, methinks, none see the light as peerless as these flowers. From all I see you have no other friend more intimate than me. Such autumn splendour, I must not misuse, as steadily it fleets. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... misery caused in a single year by bad crowns and bad shillings. Whether Whigs or Tories, Protestants or Papists were uppermost, the grazier drove his beasts to market, the grocer weighed out his currants, the draper measured out his broadcloth, the hum of buyers and sellers was as loud as ever in the towns; the cream overflowed the pails of Cheshire; the apple juice foamed in the presses of Herefordshire; the piles of crockery glowed in the furnaces of the Trent, and the barrows of coal rolled fast along the ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... women—at six o'clock in the morning and worked until six at night. I never worked so hard, nor did so much. All day long there was a fire of jokes and jolly gibes, interspersed with song, while beneath all ran a gentle hum of confidential interchange of thought. The man who owned the field was there to direct our efforts and urge us on in well-doing by merry raillery, threat, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... paper that way. Just say in big letters 'The World Is On Fire.' That will make 'em look up. They'll say you're a smart one. I don't care. I don't envy you. I just snatched that idea out of the air. I would make a newspaper hum. You got ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... flights of stairs, and I was panting. As we went up, I had noticed a little unusual murmur of noises, which told me I was in a new world. Little indistinguishable noises, the stir and hum of the busy hive into which I had entered. Now and then a door had opened, and a head or a figure came out; but as instantly went back again on seeing Madame, and the door was softly closed. We reached the third floor. There a young lady appeared at the further end of the gallery, ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... daylight in the labyrinth of established faith. I, too, have wandered in this labyrinth, but in all my divarications I sought for Truth. With passionate longing I called her to my help. Far removed from the hum of human imbecility, down among the solitudes of untrodden forests I sought her. Here I was face to face with Nature, and listened for response to the anxious questionings of my restless heart. It was well for me that the trees were the only ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... limousines; comfortable family cars; trim little roadsters; noisy runabouts. Not a hoof-beat was to be heard. It was as though the horseless age had indeed descended upon the world. There was only a hum, a rush, a roar, as car after ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... on leaving his eastern home, after peace had been declared, for the then verge of civilization—the Ohio. Here the soldier lived to see the wilderness blossom like the rose, and here he died, grieving that infirmity prevented his flying from the din of the sledge hammer, and the busy hum of mechanical life. Mr. Duncan's father, in the vigor of manhood, crossed the Mississippi, and settled at the Cold Springs, a region then isolated from civilization, as the Ohio was many years before the ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... if to help along his enemies, he began to hum a song, his clear, high voice reaching keenly to the ears of ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... unlike the majority of such temperaments, which contrive to be buoyant on the glistening bubble of Dignity, she had likewise a modest estimate of her dues. Alack, my poor heroine had no pride! Mrs. Ford's silent censure awakened no resentment. It sounded in her ears like a dull, soporific hum. Lizzie was deeply enamored of what a French book terms her aises intellectuelles. Her mental comfort lay in the ignoring of problems. She possessed a certain native insight which revealed many of the horrent inequalities of her pathway; but she found it so cruel and disenchanting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... that sing'st of ravishment, Make thy sad grove in my dishevell'd hair: As the dank earth weeps at thy languishment, So I at each sad strain will strain a tear, And with deep groans the diapason bear: For burthen-wise I'll hum on Tarquin still, While thou on Tereus descant'st ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... A hum of voices echoed out into the night, but the platform in front of the door was deserted. Occasionally some wanderer either entered or departed, merging into the crowd within or disappearing through the darkness without. To the left of the building, largely within its shadow, ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... cousins took a walk in the meadow, toward the mill pond. The air was now cool and pleasant, and as the boys moved through the narrow path, among the low grass, thousands of grasshoppers, and other insects, filled the air with their cheerful hum. Thomas, with his companions, passed round the mill, and then climbed a fence which led through a field of corn. The corn was not very high, so that they had to be careful not to tread upon it. When they reached the other side, Samuel saw that the fence was covered ...
— The Summer Holidays - A Story for Children • Amerel
... I should ha' heerd speak of it. He was pretty bad a spell ago—about when you went away—but he's been better sen. So they say. I ha'n't seen him.—Well Flidda," he added with somewhat of a sly gleam in his eye,—"do you think you're going to make up your mind to stay to hum this time?" ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... harness, and the last of the guns from the fleet. Then the night is quiet again and hot as ever, and there's nothing left of the glare and noise of the day, only the glowing lamps on some of the buildings, and the subdued hum of the talk of the moving thousands, and the whispering sound of their bare feet in the dust. The Eastern crowd is distinctly impressed and very much compressed; they will now spend the rest of the evening gazing at the Bombay ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... one, going on, began to hum again, but near the door of her father's study she grew silent and stopped. The sound of a number of men's voices in conversation reached her. She dropped her hand, ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... Sir Hum-phrey Gilbert was one of the first men who tried to make a set-tle-ment in A-mer-i-ca. Twice did he bring men and ships over the sea, and twice did he fail, and sail back for England. The second time, he was on a little ship called the "Squirrel." Another ...
— Fifty Famous Stories Retold • James Baldwin
... There would have been no occasion for the captain to mention it. He searched for a bit of firmer ground on which to rest the camera and found it. He began to worry about the hum of the dynamo. Would it be heard when they turned it on? And the filament of the infrared searchlight would be visible, too, against the dark background of the marsh. Did ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... a day typical of early April in New York, rather cold and gray, with steely sunlight. Spring breathed in the air, but the women passing along Fifty-seventh Street wore furs and wraps. She heard the distant clatter of an L train and then the hum of a motor car. A hurdy-gurdy jarred into the interval ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... the Bronte sisterhood should convince the literary aspirant that the creative imagination is sufficient unto itself and independent of the stimulus of contact with the busy hum of men. If it be necessary, the literary genius by divination can portray life without seeing it. Bricks ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... to any of the insinuations which it seems people have thought worth while to launch at some member or members of your government with respect to my mission.' Though Mr. Gladstone was never by any means unconscious of the hum and buzz of paltriness and malice that often surrounds conspicuous public men, nobody was ever more regally indifferent. Graham predicted that though Gladstone would always be the first man in the House of Commons, he would not again be what he was ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... threaded everywhere a large shrubbery, and in all sorts of corners and quiet places little dining tables had been placed. Scarcely any one was in sight of any other person, although they were so close together that all the time there was a hum of voices. In the distance, down by the river, a large gondola was passing slowly backwards and forwards, on which an orchestra played soft music. Julien and Madame Christophor crossed the narrow strip of lawn together and followed Monsieur Leon ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... venison pie more heartily. As I ate and drank, I smiled at the strangeness of my fortunes—to come thus straight from the wild seas and the company of outlaws into a place of silver and damask and satin coats and lace cravats and orderly wigs. The soft hum of gentlefolks' speech was all around me, those smooth Virginian voices compared with which my Scots tongue was as strident as a raven's. But as I listened, I remembered Ringan and Lawrence, and, "Ah, my silken friends," thought ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... perceived it. By this time night had completely closed in, and still the silken ball pursued its course. So long as lights were burning in the towns and villages which it passed in rapid succession, the solitary voyagers looked down on the scene with delight; sometimes they could even catch the hum of the yet busy multitude, or the bark of a watch-dog; but midnight came, and the world ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... for thee, O my lord." Asked the Sultan, "What is thy counsel?" And the thief said, "I repent and will deliver into thy hand all who are evildoers, and whomsoever I bring not, I will stand in his stead." Cried the Sultan, "Give hum a robe of honour and accept his profession of penitence." So he went down from the presence and returning to his comrades, related to them that which had passed, when they confessed his subtlety and gave him that which ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the broad plantations of bananas and sways the orange groves. The gardens are rich in flowers of brilliant hues. The fields swarm with negroes and ox-carts; the ponderous machinery of the boiling-houses maintains a steady hum; the picturesque buildings are all touched with Fortuny-like tints: there is much to see and much to tell of, but I must have some regard for your patience. I have not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... returned the boy. "We are running light just now. You should come a few weeks before Christmas if you want to see things hum here." ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... ground the Episcopal palace, a half-deserted, barrack-like building, overlooks a neglected vineyard, of which the clusters, black on the under side, snow-white on the other with lime-dust, gather around them a melancholy hum of flies. Through the arches of its trelliswork the avenue of the great valley is seen in descending distance, enlarged with line beyond line of tufted foliage, languid and rich, degenerating at last into leagues of grey Maremma, wild with the thorn and the willow; on each side of it, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... was now under the close-reefed fore-top sail, a diminutive try sail on the mizzen, and the jib. The hum had increased to a roar, but still not a breath of wind stirred ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... the words with the dramatic action and intensity they deserved. In the hum of talk around and across the table it was doubtful whether or not they were heard, and yet more than one of the guests glanced up with a look of interrogation. Dorothea caught her father's eyes in a gaze which he had some ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... from them and bent over his dials in a last frantic effort to get his motor started. The instinct of self-preservation was dominant now—and to his joy, suddenly the powerful little engine began to hum with life. ...
— Spawn of the Comet • Harold Thompson Rich
... Punnagas and Karnikaras and Vakulas and Divya Patalas and Patalas and Narikelas and Chandanas and Arjunas and similar other beautiful and sacred trees resplendent with fragrant flowers and sweet fruits. And the whole forest was maddened by the sweet notes of the kokila and echoed with the hum of maddened bees. And the king became possessed with desire, and he saw not his wife before him. Maddened by desire he was roaming hither and thither, when he saw a beautiful Asoka decked with dense foliage, its branches covered with flowers. And the king sat at his ease in ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... and mulberry trees, not to speak of pear and plum. One of the chief manufactures of these parts is that of paints and colours: there are also ribbon and cotton factories. Rich as is the country naturally, its chief wealth arises from these industries. In every village you hear the hum of machinery. ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... shrug, the hum, or ha; these petty brands, That calumny doth use;— For calumny will sear Virtue itself:—these shrugs, these bums, and ha's, When you have said, she's goodly, come between, Ere you can ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... rapidity. Once Cheops nearly escaped, for I had placed his box in the sun, and the warmth so excited and waked him up that he opened his wing-cases, used his gauze-like inner wings, and with a mighty hum was all but gone in search of his native land, but fortunately I was near enough to intercept his flight and place him in safe quarters. After keeping this curious creature in perfect health for sixteen ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... the blue car was the one note of modernity; but hardly had we turned in at a great gate worthy to open in welcome for Queen Jeanne of Naples, or Bertrand du Guesclin, than we were in the hum of twentieth-century life. I resented the change, for one expects nothing, wants nothing, modern in Avignon; but in a moment or two we had left the bright cafes and shops behind, to plunge back into the middle ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... lying ungathered, looking melancholy, with here and there a patch of colour from the faded flowers, and from it came a heavy, sickly scent. It was still. The other side of the hurdle there was a monotonous hum of ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Hyperspace, to acceleration and anti-gravity, the oscillation of that swinging seat, the weird swaying of the half-recumbent figure, did things to his sight and to his sense of balance which seemed perilous in the extreme. But when the groan broke through the hum of Ali's mysterious machine, all of them knew that the Engineer-apprentice had found the answer to their problem, that Hovan ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... rising, and the hard trunks of the trees swelling with its flow; the grass blades pushing upwards; the seeds completing their shape; the tinted petals uncurling. Dreamily listening, leaning on the gate, all these are audible to the inner senses, while the ear follows the midsummer hum, now sinking, now sonorously increasing over the oaks. An effulgence fills the southern boughs, which the eye cannot sustain, but which ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... here; for as Bart sat munching there in the delicious restfulness of his position, with the soft warm breeze just playing through the leaves, the golden sunshine raining down amongst the leaves and branches in dazzling streams, while the pleasant whirr and hum of insects was mingled with the gentle crop, crop, crop of Black Boy's teeth as he feasted on the succulent growth around, all tended to produce drowsiness, and in a short ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... had waited—a lazy summer day, drowsy with the hum of bees and heavy with the perfume of cottage flowers. On entering the village he had put up at The Dawn Arms, an old-fashioned hunting hostel which owed its prosperity to the fame of the Dawn foxhounds. Having bathed and breakfasted, he ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... eaten up by savages; as she persisted would be the case if he carried out his preposterous intentions. But Everard only laughed. "I cannot see how you can reconcile it to your conscience, to doom such a girl as that, to so wretched an existence, look at her, is she fit for such a hum-drum-knock-about life." ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... Sarah, the servant, lit up his mill, whose wide and long front now glared one great illumination, throwing a sufficient light on the yard to obviate all fear of confusion arising from obscurity. Already a deep hum of voices became audible. Mr. Malone had at length issued from the counting-house, previously taking the precaution to dip his head and face in the stone water-jug; and this precaution, together with the sudden alarm, had nearly restored to him ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... removed alike from the ambitious strife of cities and the bloody spectacles of war. Lying amid the solitudes of the mountains, where no sounds fall on the ear but the bleating of flocks, the lowing of cattle, the hum of bees, the baying of a watch-dog from the lonely homestead, the murmur of hidden rills, the everlasting rush of the waterfall as it plunges flashing into its dark, foaming pool, pastoral are eminently peaceful scenes. Indeed, the best emblem of peace which ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... beginning: there was nothing left to fancy, nothing to expect, nothing to see by the wayside, save here and there an unhomely-looking homestead, and here and there a solitary, spectacled stone-breaker; and you were only accompanied, as you went doggedly forward, by the gaunt telegraph-posts and the hum of the resonant wires in the keen sea-wind. To one who had learned to know their song in warm pleasant places by the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the country, and make it still bleaker by suggested ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... village were ringing for evensong. From the church precincts twinkled the yellow lights of candles and lanterns, then there was the hum of people's voices. Many of the lights dispersed to the right and left, others moved down to the river side. There was the sound of foot-falls on the bottom of a boat and the splashing ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... the defeated champions were well on their way to their own village, when, had the result been different, they would have staid for several days in what may be considered the Blackfoot capital. The hum and murmur of voices and the restless moving to and fro were audible outside, but the old companions were left to themselves. Mul-tal-la had succeeded in impressing upon his countrymen that when their guests retired to their tepee they were ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... quite to collect my thoughts, and felt as if I had just awakened from a long heavy sleep. It was now dark; lights streamed from the open windows of the gambling-rooms; the voices of the croupiers, the stir and hum of the players and jingling of money were distinctly heard in the street without. I have already told you I am no gambler, not from scruple, but choice. Nevertheless, I used often to stroll up to the Cursaal for an hour of in evening, when the play ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... the dim and melancholy distance, the feelings they inspired were those of discomfort and depression. On each side of them were a variety of lonely lakes, abrupt precipices, and extensive marshes; and as our travellers went along, the hum of the snipe, the feeble but mournful cry of the plover, and the wilder and more piercing whistle of the curlew, still deepened the melancholy dreariness of their situation, and added to their anxiety to press on towards the ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... extended beyond the illimitable range of the Angel's eye, machinery and tongues were engaged in a contest which filled the ozone with an incomparable hum. Men and women in profusion were leaning against walls or the pillars on which the great roof was supported, assiduously pressing buttons. The scent of expanding food ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... deftly wound the end of the fibres on the point of the spindle. She then gave a gentle motion to the wheel with a wooden peg held in her right hand, and seized with the left the roll at exactly the right distance from the spindle to allow for one "drawing." Then the hum of the wheel rose to a sound like the echo of wind; she stepped backward quickly, one, two, three steps, holding high the long yarn as it twisted and quivered. Suddenly she glided forward with even, graceful stride and let the yarn wind on the swift spindle. Another pinch ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... when he stood there. The silence was profound, for the people of the settlement sympathized so deeply with their beloved pastor's grief that even the ordinary hum of life appeared to be hushed, except now and then when a low wail would break out and float away on the night wind. These sounds of woe were full of meaning. They told that there were other mourners there that night,—that the recent battle had not been fought without producing ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... home excite their care for those Which, dire to tell, their much-loved country owes, And loud and upright, till their prize be known, They thwart the King's supplies to raise their own. But bees on flowers alighting cease their hum— So, settling upon places, Whigs grow dumb. And, tho' most base is he who, 'neath the shade Of Freedom's ensign plies corruption's trade, And makes the sacred flag he dares to show His passport to the market of her foe, Yet, yet, I own, so venerably dear ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... reedy marsh upon his right, where a windmill waved its lazy arms, a score of larks were singing. To his left the gulls mewed across the cliffs and the remoter sandbanks that thrust up their yellow ridges under the ebb-tide. The hum of the little town ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was not far off, this was the darkest hour of the night, so that even the sounds of dockland were muted and the riverside slept as deeply as the great port of London ever sleeps. Vague murmurings there were and distant clankings, with the hum of machinery ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... came the seconds with the activity of a lot of monkeys, and the two men were hurriedly seated upon stools and each was fanned furiously with a towel by one second, while the other bathed his neck and face with cold water. A hum of conversation arose. ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... the magnificent saloons of Zoological House than Mrs. Bridgeman's guests began to flock around them from all the four quarters of the mansion, deserting even the neighbourhood of the guitars and the inviting seclusion of the various refreshment-rooms. From all sides rose the hum of comment and the murmur of speculation. Pince-nez were adjusted, eyeglasses screwed into eyes, fingers pointed, feet elevated upon uneasy toes. Pretty girls boldly trod upon the gowns of elderly matrons in the endeavour to draw near to Mrs. Bridgeman and her ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... the water went the Mermaid, and faster after her came the whale. Above the hum of the engines was heard the hiss of the powerful gas. The ship ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... minister of the gospel, the thug and murderer. No one looking upon this strangely assorted gathering in a Southern community would for a moment question its significance. Only when politics and the race question are being discussed is such a gathering possible in the South. There is a loud rap: the hum of voices ceases. The individual who gives the signal stands at a small table at the end of the long narrow hall. One hand rests upon the table, with the other he nervously toys with a gavel. He is a tall, lean, lank, ungainly chap, whose cheek bones as prominent ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... Worcester and Savery; every steamship will bring into grateful memory Fitch and Stevens, and Bell and Fulton; thousands of locomotives, crossing the continents, will perpetuate the thought of the Stephensons and their colleagues in the introduction of the railway; the hum of millions of spindles and the music of the electric wire will tell of the work of Corliss and his contemporaries and successors who made these things possible, and all kingdoms and races, all nations, will revere the name of James Watt, the genius to whom ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... out a tray with a cup and saucer, sugar and cream and some thin slices of buttered bread. From the upper gallery there came to her the low hum of conversation. The sleepers had awakened and were getting bathed ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... "war and rumors of war." The backless benches, high above the floor, groaned under the weight of irrepressible young America; the multitude of mischievous, shining faces, the bare legs and feet, swinging to and fro, and the mingled hum of happy voices, spelling aloud life's first lessons, prophesied the future glory of the State. The curriculum of the old field school was the same everywhere—one Webster's blue backed, elementary spelling book, one thumb-paper, ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... alone, its Great Place suddenly leaped out of bed. On market-days, some friendly enchanter struck his staff upon the stones of the Great Place, and instantly arose the liveliest booths and stalls, and sittings and standings, and a pleasant hum of chaffering and huckstering from many hundreds of tongues, and a pleasant, though peculiar, blending of colours,—white caps, blue blouses, and green vegetables,—and at last the Knight destined for ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... did make me understand the nature of musicall sounds made by strings, mighty prettily; and told me that having come to a certain number of vibrations proper to make any tone, he is able to tell how many strokes a fly makes with her wings, (those flies that hum in their flying by the note that it answers to in musique, during their flying. That, I suppose, is a little too much refined; but his discourse in general of sound was mighty fine. To St. James's, where we attended with the rest of my fellows on the Duke, whom I found with ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... necessary duties as had been assigned them, or were engaged in gazing with curious eyes at the ship which so eagerly sought to draw as near as possible to their own dangerous vessel. The low but continued hum of voices, sounds such alone as discipline permitted, had afforded the only evidence of the interest they took in the scene; but, the instant the first tap on the drum was heard, each groupe severed, and every man repaired, with bustling activity, to his well-known station. The stir among ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... already mentioned that Parkhurst stood some two or three miles above the point at which the River Colven flows into the sea. From the school-house we could often catch the hum of the waves breaking lazily along the shore of Colveston Bay; or, if the wind blew hard from the sea, it carried with it the roar of the breakers on the bar mouth, and the distant thunder of the surf on ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... to a great height, and headed westward at such speed that the hum of the air past its smooth plates rose to a shrill, almost inaudible moan. After a lapse of some hours we came in sight of an impressive mountain range, which I correctly guessed to be the Rockies. Swerving slightly, we headed down toward one of the topmost pinnacles of the range, and there unfolded ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... his work. "If I am a bore, please tell me," he said, "but it is rather a fairy-tale, you know, when you've made up your mind to a hum-drum law career to find a thing ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... promised that she might visit the Lilac Lady that afternoon, but for some reason had changed her mind and put off the visit until the morrow. Ho, hum! What was a small girl to do to amuse herself this warm day, when she had already done everything she could think of, and had been forbidden to go where she ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... This must of necessity be the lady who is in love with me. See, how she surveys my person! certainly one wit knows another by instinct. By that old gentleman, it should be the lady Laura too. Hum! Benito, thou ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... and frisk about, The bees hum round their hive, The butterflies are coming out,— 'Tis good ...
— Gems of Poetry, for Girls and Boys • Unknown
... range across the plain. He was dog tired, so that for very exhaustion his brain had stopped its tormenting work. He lit a fire and sat by it, huddled in his coat, smoking, dozing, not able really to sleep for cold and hunger. The bright stars, flung all about the sky, mildly regarded hum. Coyotes mourned their loneliness and hunger near and far, and once, in the broken woods above him, a mountain lion gave its blood-curdling scream. Prosper hated the night and its beautiful desolation, he hated the God that ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... deprived of many of nature's choicest blessings, it appeared delightful. The fresh air, redolent of new-mown hay, fanned her pale cheek and feverish brow, and allayed her agitation and excitement. The perfect stillness, broken only by the lowing of the cattle in the adjoining pastures, by the drowsy hum of the dor-fly, or the rippling of the beck in the valley, further calmed her; and the soothing influence was completed by a contemplation of the serene heavens, wherein were seen the starry host, with the thin bright crescent of the new moon in the midst of them, diffusing ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... have some special dislike to our waggon. They have just placed two shells, one fifty yards in front of it, and the other fifty yards behind; one of them burst on impact, the other didn't. The progress of a shell sounds far off like the hum of a mosquito, rising as it nears to a hoarse screech, and then "plump." We mind them very little now. There is great competition for the fragments, as "curios." It is cold, grey, and sunless today. Last night there was heavy rain, and our ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... which he had fallen had probably once been swept by a torrent, but now a tiny stream only warbled through it. The murmur of this, by Leslie's side, prevented his understanding the words of those above. The hum of their voices could be heard ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... the short waves by the San Dominick's side; and then, glancing about the decks where he stood, saw the oakum-pickers still gravely plying their fingers; and heard the low, buzzing whistle and industrious hum of the hatchet-polishers, still bestirring themselves over their endless occupation; and more than all, as he saw the benign aspect of nature, taking her innocent repose in the evening; the screened sun in the ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... was Sunday, and in the old refectory, in the late afternoon, a few Huguenots, warned by messages from the farm, met to profit by one of their scanty secret opportunities for public worship. The hum of the prayer, and discourse of the pastor, rose up through the broken vaulting to Eustacie, still lying on her bed; for she had been much shaken by the fatigues of the day and alarm of the night, and bitterly grieved, too, by a message which Nanon conveyed ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... are dumb, No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. No nightly trance, or breathed spell, Inspires the pale-eyed priest from ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... settled in Bulawayo and used to go with me when I went on trek. At the time when I left Africa two years before, I had lost sight of him for months, and heard that he was somewhere on the Congo poaching elephants. He had always a great idea of making things hum so loud in Angola that the Union Government would have to step in and annex it. After Rhodes Peter had the biggest notions ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... sharp, insistent, penetrating through the quiet hum of voices rising from the groups about the fire. By this time a very considerable number of men present had joined themselves to the group ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... produced by the European species is a sort of drumming or whizzing note, like the hum of a spinning-wheel. The male commences this performance about dusk, and continues it at intervals during a great part of the night. It is effected while the breast is inflated with air, like that of a cooing Dove. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... atmosphere for what they stole from him under ground. The water falls back again, however, and is received by the marble basin at the base, to form a neat pond, where gold and silver fish sport and gambol. A little at a distance, to the rear, the fragrance of honey and the busy hum of the bee are perceived by your grateful senses. The place looks like an earthly paradise; every thing there seems to laugh without restraint, from the creeping rose fastened to the hedge to the tall, princely-looking mountain ash, with its ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... of lights twinkled in the dusk, some flitting about like fireflies, others stationary, while a hum of many voices ascended to our ears. The lights showed us that we were gliding over the city, and the voices told us that our arrival was causing a great commotion. Presently we floated above a large ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... decent-looking girls, and their conversation was conspicuously clean—not always a characteristic of their class. Miss Gibbs, despite her justifiable prejudice against lady-friends, proved not unkind, and we congratulated ourselves as we bent over our work and listened to the cheerful hum of voices. ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... he gets warmed up, it all comes back to him. He catches your step and away you go, a gay, adventurous, half-predatory couple. How quickly he falls into the old ways of jest and anecdote and song! You may have known him for years without having heard him hum an air, or more than casually revert to the subject of his experience during the war. You have even questioned and cross-questioned him without firing the train you wished. But get him out on a vacation tramp, and you can walk it all out of him. By the camp-fire ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... morning, and the children ran down stairs half dressed and shivering. Dotty spread out her stiff, red fingers before the cooking-stove like the sticks of a fan. "O, hum!" thought she, drearily, "I wish I could see the red coals in our grate. My mamma wouldn't let me go to the table with such hair as this. Prudy'd say 'twas 'harum scarum.' But I can't brush it with a tooth-comb, 'thout any ...
— Dotty Dimple at Play • Sophie May
... scene of cheerfulness and gayety, and the officers had their usual trouble in making the men go to sleep instead of spending the night in talking, singing, and gaming. In the peaceful camp of the Third Alabama, in that state, the scenes were similar. There was always "a steady hum of laughter and talk, dance, song, shout, and the twang of musical instruments." It was "a scene full of life and fun, of jostling, scuffling, and racing, of clown performances and cake-walks, of impromptu minstrelsy, speech-making, and preaching, of deviling, guying, and fighting, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... herself remained almost entirely invisible, shut up in the sanctity of her own rooms; and so the whole house had a sense of stillness that seemed only heightened by the glory of the autumn sunshine, and the hum of bees and rustle of leaves that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... upon them in a somewhat disjointed fashion—"Marathon, yes—rather flat, isn't it? But the mountains make a fine background. We went there with guides one day, when I was a young man. The Acropolis—hum! ha!—very fine ruins, but a most inconvenient place to get at. Would you like to see ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... day following this dinner and momentous conversation, Sally was working listlessly amid the hum of girls' chatter, which proceeded unchecked while Miss Summers was out of the room, when she had a singular knowledge of something in store. She was struck almost by fear. Quickly she looked up, and across at Rose Anstey, and beyond ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... and main. Behind and near them numerous were the tents As freckled clouds o'erfloat our vernal skies, Numerous as wander in warm moonlight nights, Along Meander's or Cayster's marsh, Swans pliant-necked and village storks revered. Throughout each nation moved the hum confused, Like that from myriad wings o'er Scythian cups Of frothy milk, concreted soon with blood. Throughout the fields the savoury smoke ascends, And boughs and branches shade the hides unbroached. Some roll the flowery ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... passed, the hum of the voices floated to his ear; the ladies of the party lingered by this soldier and by that, buying half the things in the chamber, filling their hands with all the quaint trifles, ordering the daggers and the flissas and the ornamented saddles and the desert skins to adorn ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... of the highly colored medieval word pictures so much in vogue. "My book should smell of pines, and resound with the hum of insects," might have been its motto, so sweet and wholesome was it with a springlike sort of freshness which plainly betrayed that the author had learned some of Nature's deepest secrets and possessed the skill to tell them in tuneful words. The songs went ringing through one's ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... the wharf it was evident that something unusual was in the air. The pier was thronged with fishermen, gathered together in little groups, leaning idly against the empty fish-boxes. At the landing party's approach the low hum of conversation died away into a faint murmur. A solitary figure, standing apart from the others, hurried forward to meet the girl as she ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... darkness, silent, forsaken, the heavy drop-curtain lowered to the floor. Through its obscuring folds resounded noisily a crash of musical instruments, the incessant shuffling of feet, a mingled hum of voices, evidencing that the dance was already on in full volume. Far back, behind much protruding scenery, a single light flickered like a twinkling star, its dim, uncertain radiance the sole guide through the intricacies of cluttered ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... as before from the neighbouring villages; but the Turks' drum kept up an uninterrupted roll as a challenge whenever the nogara sounded. Instead of the intense stillness that had formerly been almost painful, a distinct hum of distant voices betokened the gathering of large bodies of men. However, we were well fortified; and the Latookas knew it. We occupied the very stronghold that they had themselves constructed for ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... seemed to feel it all through him. Then he returned to the mossy bank. He did not reply to Joe. In fact, all his faculties were absorbed in watching and feeling, and he lay there long after Joe went off to the village. The murmur of water, the hum of bees, the songs of strange birds, the sweet, warm air, the dreamy summer somnolence of the valley—all these added drowsiness to Shefford's weary lassitude, and he fell asleep. When he awoke Nas Ta Bega was sitting near him and Joe was ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... Ioam d'Eluas, e fernam de Pina por secretario. E foram por mar muy honradamente cum muy boa companhia: hos quaes foram en nome del rey confirmar as ligas antiquas com Inglaterra, que polla-condican deltas ho nouo Rey de hum zeyno e do outro era obrigado a mandar confirmar: e tambien pera monstrarem ho titolo que el rey tinha no senhorio de Guinee, pera que depois de visto el rey D'Inglaterra defendesse em todos seus reynos, que ninguen armasse nem podesse mandar a Guinee: ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... angels, his play was sad stuff; and when he paused for my approbation, I ventured to suggest an alteration in one of the speeches. "There, Sir," said Davie, in the vein of Cambyses, "take the pen; let me see, Sir, how you would turn it." I accordingly took the pen, and re-wrote the speech. "Hum," said Davie, as he ran his eye along the lines, "that, Sir, is mere poetry. What, think you, could the great Kean make of feeble stuff like that? Let me tell you, Sir, you have no notion whatever of stage effect." I, of ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... few lines in the press of business to tell you I am well, but very lonely, with a view out over the green, in this dull, rainy weather, while the bumble-bees hum and the sparrows twitter. Grand audience tomorrow. It's vexatious that I have to buy linen, towels, table-cloths, and sheets. * * * Farewell. Hearty love, and write! ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... of sap, and the first leaves bursting out. Even the sand did not annoy her to-day. She stepped rapidly through the expanse of it that girdled the forest, and hurried on through the firs to the cottage. The whole wood was alive with hum and cry. Wherever a group of other trees rose amid the firs, the loud chirp of the chaffinch was heard, or the eager twitter of some little newly-wedded birds, disputing about the position of their ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... thus deserted by her companions, Shoofly began a low, musical hum of a wail and walled large eyes up at Everett, at whose feet she was seated. In instant sympathetic response he applied the toe of his shoe to the small of the whimpering tot's back and proceeded awkwardly, though with the best intentions in the world, to follow the General's directions ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... lights beginning to flicker uncertainly as the wind that heralds the sunrise came fitfully up. The soft wet grass under their feet was flecked with little grayish-silver cobwebs, and here and there they heard the morning chirp of ground-nesting birds. As they went farther up the hill a hum of voices came from above; the voices of people, men and women, mingled and consonant like the voices of the birds, but with a certain tone of trouble and expectancy. Every now and then one individual voice or another would dominate the general murmur, and would be followed ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... my mistress, pretty pilfering bee, And say thou bring'st this honey bag from me: When on her lip thou hast thy sweet dew placed, Mark if her tongue but slyly steal a taste. If so, we live; if not, with mournful hum Toll forth my death; next, to ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... street in the half-shadow; and a quiet star or two high up in a dark sky; one seemed to be falling in a great half-circle—it was only an airplane keeping watch over the sleeping city. Clerambault followed its sweep with his eyes, and seemed, to fly with it, the distant hum of the human planet coming faintly to his ear, like a strange music of the spheres not foreseen by ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... wounded were brought in for a while. The bearers were obeying the surgeon's order and were taking a rest. The officers and sisters in the theatre were in high spirits. They were trying to speak French and ridiculing each other's efforts. Captain Wycherley began to hum a tune and wave his amputation knife like the conductor of an orchestra, whereupon the others locked arms and danced up and down the theatre, talking and joking. Then Captain Calthrop broke away and danced by himself, kicking ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... 'Hum! Hum!' muttered Graham, shaking his head. 'When men thank fortune for her gifts she usually turns her ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... lilac-scented stillness, let us listen to Earth's story. All the flow'rs like moths a-flutter glimmer rich with dusky hues, Everywhere around us seem to fall from nowhere the sweet dews. Through the drowsy lull, the murmur, stir of leaf and sleep hum We can feel a gay heart beating, hear a magic singing come. Ah, I think that as we linger lighting at Earth's olden fire Fitful gleams in clay that perish, little sparks that soon expire, So the ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... country school house, and my curiosity being excited by the monotonous hum of the students within, I made bold to enter and creep along a crack between two boards until I reached the far end, where, in front of a hearth of glowing embers, sat ...
— The Marvelous Land of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... bank, on the contrary, a confused hum is heard, which proclaims the presence of industry; the fields are covered with abundant harvests; the elegance of the dwellings announces the taste and activity of the laborer; and man appears to be in the enjoyment of that ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... he says: "You are not like the people you were sixteen years ago; there were few Quakers then, but they had witchcraft fits, but now of late I do not hear of any Quaker that hath any fits, no, not so much as to buz and hum before the fit comes. But if you, Fox, doth know of any of you Quakers that have any of those witchcraft fits as formerly, bring them to me, and I shall cast out that devil which causeth those fits." The Quakers could hardly have been as angry as they were, nor their books have been so many and ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... Sara at once, and seating himself by her side in his usual corner, maintained his usual imperturbable reserve. As a rule, during these excursions he would either doze, or jot down ideas in his note-book, or hum one of the few songs he cared to hear: "Go tell Augusta, gentle swain," "Revenge, revenge, Timotheus cries," and "She wore a wreath of roses." This time, however, he did neither of these things, but watched the reflection of his daughter's face in the carriage window before him. He had white hair, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... commenced murmurin, and sed wun to another, "Oh for the flesh pots uv the Egypt we left!" "I cood, at hum, live off my Ablishn nabers." "There wuz rich men in our ward, but ez we hed the majority, they paid taxes, which we spent!" "Ablishnists is pizen, but it is well enough to hev enough uv em to tax!" and ez wun man, they ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... this was presently hushed, and two voices, accompanied by guitars, began to sing a lively seguidilla, of which, at the end of each piquant couplet, the listeners testified their approbation by a hum of mirthful applause. Before the song was over, Luis had sought and found a means of observing what was passing within doors. Grasping the lower branch of a tree which grew within a few feet of the corner of the house, he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... too. The world is on fire. Start your pieces in the paper that way. Just say in big letters 'The World Is On Fire.' That will make 'em look up. They'll say you're a smart one. I don't care. I don't envy you. I just snatched that idea out of the air. I would make a newspaper hum. ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... a house with balconies and ponderous pillars, and she and her companions went up the ample stairway and into several uncomfortably crowded, flower-bedecked rooms. Ida, however, was getting used to the lights and the music, the gleam of gems, the confused hum of voices, and the rustle of costly draperies, and, though she admitted that she liked it all, they no longer had the same exhilarating effect on her. She danced with one or two men, and then, as she sat alone for a moment, Gregory ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... proudly proved to all the world that it was not for a soldier's pay, not for the love of gain, but for a nation's glory that they had risked limb and life beneath an African sun. Then, as I looked, I caught a distant hum of voices—a far-off sound, such as I have heard amid Pacific isles when wind and waves were beating upon coral crags, and foam-topped rollers thrashed the surf into the magic music of the storm-tossed sea. It ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... pain at the glance of your eyes, the ascetic lays the fruit of his austerities at your feet, the songs of poets hum and swarm round the perfume of your presence. Your feet, as in careless joy they flit on, wound even the heart of the hollow wind with the tinkle of ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... visible. It must have been a cheerful spot in the clear sunny days of summer, when even heaths and moors look gay—when the deep blue of the hills seems as if softening its tints to harmonize with the deep blue of the sky—when the hum of the bee is heard amid the heath, and the lark high overhead. But it must have been a gloomy and miserable solitude on that night when the husband of Annie lay tossing in mortal agony, and no neighbour near to counsel or assist, her weeping ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... man advanced—he whispered sulkily in the ears of the Grand Vizier, "Guggly ka ghee, hum khedgeree," said he, "the oil does not boil yet—wait one minute." The assistants blew, the fire blazed, the oil was heated. The Vizier drew a few feet aside: taking a large ladle full of the boiling ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the noise it made so much as the fact that it could make any noise at all.... Shut your mouth tight and hum on the letter m-mmmmmmm—that's it exactly. Only It's was ten times as loud, and vibrating. The vibrations shook ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... lover! How peacefully the old man sleeps, thinks Abbot, as he glances a moment around the room. There are flowers on the table near the open window; books, too, which, perhaps, she had tried to read aloud. The window opens out over Pennsylvania Avenue, and the hum and bustle of thronging life comes floating up from below; a roar of drums is growing louder every minute, and presently bursts upon the ear as though, just issuing from a neighboring street, the drummers were marching forth upon the avenue. Abbot glances ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... quietly. The wood was filled with people, and a continuous hum of voices rose up under the tangled foliage of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... all the weapins up, an' then he come an' grinned, He showed his ivory some, I guess, an' sez, 'You're fairly pinned; Jest buckle on your leg agin, an' git right up an' come, 'T wun't du fer fammerly men like me to be so long frum hum.' At fust I put my foot right down an' swore I wouldn't budge. 'Jest ez you choose,' sez he, quite cool, 'either be shot or trudge.' So this black-hearted monster took an' act'lly druv me back Along the very feetmarks o' my happy mornin' track, An' kep' me pris'ner 'bout six ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... of the light breeze in the tree tops, the droning hum of night insects, and the occasional call of a night bird—-these were all the sounds that came to the ears of the ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... which eventually led them through the north suburbs into the country. The April dusk was settling upon the fields as they raced along; in the isolated houses, lights were beginning to twinkle; there was a swaying among the trees and roadside bush; the hum of the flying car must have been borne long distances; for far away people raised their heads from the finishing tasks of the day to look at it as ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... threw it on the deck. She made Blinker sit down and sat by his side and put her hand in his. "What'll you bet we don't reach the pier all right?" she said and began to hum a song. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... neighborhood where they dwelt, feeling compassion for her loneliness and sorrow, invited her to divide her time among them, and make their homes her own. One of her eccentricities (and she had more than one,) was a passion for spinning on a little wheel. Its monotonous hum had long been the music of her lonely life; the distaff, with its swaddling bands of flax, the petted child of her affections, and the thread which she manufactured the means of her daily support. Wherever she went, her wheel preceded her, as an avant courier, after ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... weed, and small groves of the scarlet stalks of the wild buckwheat. This level sea of weeds stood so high that when she threaded the narrow path they reached above her waist. The bees in the white asters were humming as they hum in apple bloom. The blue jays were calling and flying in low horizontal flights. The valley stretched to the south-east, then curved; a little mountain barred the view, upon whose pine-trees the distant air ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... here was all the neighbourhood crazy mad at the foxes, and planning a great chase covering a circuit of miles before the ground thawed; here was Easter and all the children coming, except Shelley—again, it would cost too much for only one day—and with everything beginning to hum, I found out there would be more amusement outdoors than inside. That was how I came to study out the daisy piece. There was nothing in the silly, untrue lines: the pull and tug was in what ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... William Black had described this very fish in A Princess of Thule. I pulled the book from my pocket, and, lighting a pipe, sat down to read that delightful chapter over again. The breeze played softly down the valley. The warm sunlight was filled with the musical hum of insects and the murmur of falling waters. I thought how much pleasanter it would have been to learn salmon-fishing, as Black's hero did, from the Maid of Borva, than from a red-headed gillie. But, ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... Harry began to hum a song, and, between the bars, he said, "You may go to the devil. I care not a curse for anything you can do. So think of your dignity, my lord. And ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... appreciates the real silence of the equatorial forest which one has heard about at home. Within a few yards, hundreds of frogs commence to croak loudly and continue steadily, with a few pauses to breathe, until daybreak. Hundreds of monkeys screech shrilly in the trees and millions of mosquitoes hum steadily within an inch or two of one's ears. All manner of animal cries are heard in the forest and the hippos blow loudly as they rise to the surface to breathe. As a matter of fact, the noise at midnight in the forest, when every beast, bird and insect ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... larks are so multitudinous that no distinct song can be caught, and amidst the confused melody comes the note of the thrush and the blackbird. A constant under-running accompaniment is just audible in the hum of innumerable insects and the sharp buzz of flies darting past the ear. Only those who live in the open air and watch the fields and sea from hour to hour and day to day know what they are and what they mean. The chance visitor, or he who looks now and then, never understands them. While ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... himself in this part of the world with a modest hum, heard but a short distance away, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains may almost be called a noisy bird. The first one I noticed dashed out of a thickly leaved tree with loud, angry cries, swooped down toward me, and flew back and forth over ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... man raised his head as a car pulled into the curving driveway. The warm hum of the turboelectric engine stopped, and a man climbed out of the vehicle. He walked with easy strides across the grass to where the elderly gentleman sat. He was lithe, of indeterminate age, but with a look of great determination. There was something in his ...
— Suite Mentale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... burnished brand and musketoon, So gallantly you come, I rede you for a bold dragoon, That lists the tuck of drum."— "I list no more the tuck of drum, No more the trumpet hear; But when the beetle sounds his hum, My ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... red howdah rocked as the thief elephant entered the river; a moment more, only the howdah showing. Distantly like the hum of furious ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... "Hum," said Hugh John, with a curl of his nose; "well, that's done with! But it was good about the Storm and the Duel! The ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... was the Marquess of H——, known well forty years ago in fashionable circles, when George IV. was Prince, now popular and much esteemed as a country gentleman and improving landlord. There was also Mr. H——, an M.P., celebrated, before he settled into place and "ceased his hum," as a hunter of bishops—a handsome, dark man, in leathers and patent Napoleons; with his wife on a fine bay horse, who rode boldly throughout ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... that of the doleful and droning church choir. We sang simple songs about nature, conduct, duties to the Heavenly Father, to parents and teacher. Their notes lingered in my ears for a great many years, and I can still hum some of them. We drew plain figures, blocks, cones, the sides and roofs of buildings and outlines of trees. In penmanship I made no progress, and it was always unformed and illiterate until I was a man, and took it in hand without a teacher. My two years' detention from school did not seem ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... Manufacturing Interest pays not a dollar into the public Treasury that stays there. And yet airs of patriotism are put on here by men representing that interest. I visited New England last Summer, * * * when I heard the swelling hum of her Manufactories, and saw those who only a short time ago worked but a few hands, now working their thousands, and rolling up their countless wealth, I felt that it was an unhealthy prosperity. To my mind it presented a wealth wrung from the labor, the sinews, ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... the experimental, to a more perfect stage of co-operative life, a marvelous change for the better is noted. New factories have been built, new industries instituted, and organized. The busy hum of industrial prosperity, everywhere claims attention. Meanwhile, the demands for a better esthetic culture, have not been neglected. The interiors of both factory and workshop, have been made additionally attractive, by a more artistic, educative class of decorations. All industrial buildings, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... them now. They are just shaking their heads together and whispering, aren't they? Whispering very gently to-day, because it is Sunday. Sometimes they get angry with one another and scream, but I like to hear them hum and sing best. Nurse says it's the wind that makes them do it. Don't you like to hear them? When I lie in bed I listen to them around the house, and I always want to sing with them. Nurse doesn't like it. She says it's the ...
— Probable Sons • Amy Le Feuvre
... "Write, Chambertin, 1203." (Those, you know, were the names and dates of the vintages.) "Yes, my lord," Mistletoe always piped up; on which Sir Godfrey would peer over her shoulder at the writing, and mutter, "Hum; yes, that's correct," just as if he knew how to read, the old humbug! Then Mistletoe, who was a silly girl and had lost her husband early, would go "Tee-hee, Sir Godfrey!" as the gallant gentleman gave her a kiss. Of course, this was not ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... the arena, without seeing the soldiers, swordsmen, or athletes who were busy there; her mind wandered further and further from the place; and the chattering of the people resolved itself into a distant hum ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... climbed two flights of stairs, and I was panting. As we went up, I had noticed a little unusual murmur of noises, which told me I was in a new world. Little indistinguishable noises, the stir and hum of the busy hive into which I had entered. Now and then a door had opened, and a head or a figure came out; but as instantly went back again on seeing Madame, and the door was softly closed. We reached the third floor. There a young lady appeared at ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the hum, or ha; these petty brands, That calumny doth use;— For calumny will sear Virtue itself:—these shrugs, these bums, and ha's, When you have said, she's goodly, come between, Ere ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... hedge-rows of the cottages around, than at any place I had before visited. "Industry is the first step to improvement, and education follows hard upon it," thought I, as on foot, attracted by a busy hum of voices, we made our way through an intervening copse towards the spot whence it seemed to come. A fig-tree, the superincumbent branches of which shaded a wide circuit of ground, arrested our progress; and looking through an opening among the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 272, Saturday, September 8, 1827 • Various
... of Grant Hall by this time and were strolling slowly along, their voices hushed for the moment by the cheery hum of boyish talk and the clatter of mess furniture, as the Corps sat at their late supper. Then several officers, gathered about the steps of the club rooms in the south end, lifted their caps to Mrs. Graham and smiled greeting ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... on my side and mean to stick up for me, all right; but if you're going to hum and haw and look grave, and take the part of the management, you had ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... under the hill of Brent, the hum of voices came down to us, for the day was still, and my guards straightened themselves in the saddle and set their ranks more orderly. But I, clad as I was in the rags of the finery I had worn at the feast whence I was taken, shrank within myself, ashamed to meet the gazes ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... one long scarf of plaited white which wore away across a lake of blue. The ghyll fell like a furled flag. The thin river under the clustering leaves sang beneath its breath. The sun was hot and the air was drowsed by the hum of insects. ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... sorry I can't shake hands. Mine are all milky; but Mrs Vincey is going to teach me butter-making this summer.' 'Ah! I'm going to London this summer,' the girl said, 'to my aunt in Bloomsbury.' She coughed as she began to hum, '"Oh, what a town! What ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... here, Where glide the rosy hours, Murm'ring the drowsy hum of bees, And fragrant with the flowers: Where Heaven's redeeming love Spans earth in Mercy's bow— The promise of the world above Unto the world below. Oh, would that she were here, Amid these shades serene— Oh, for the spell of woman's ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... I stand before you tonight to report that the state of our union is strong. Now, America is working again. The promise of our future is limitless. But we cannot realize that promise if we allow the hum of our prosperity to lull us into complacency. How we fare as a nation far into the 21st century depends upon what we ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William J. Clinton • William J. Clinton
... At midnight we were called again, Tom reporting that neither sight nor sound had occurred during his watch to disturb him. We now began to feel really refreshed, and during the next hour some of the men in my watch actually found superfluous energy enough to hum under their breath a snatch or two of a forecastle song as they paced vigilantly to and fro over the short stretch of ground which ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... gardens, and the wilder forest-walks which extended their circuitous course for many a mile along the stately hall of the Fitz-Henries; loud bursts of festive or of martial music came pealing down the wind, mixed with the hum of a gay and happy concourse, causing the nightingales to hold their peace, not in despair of rivaling the melody, but that the mirth jarred unpleasantly on the souls of the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... She loved this little spot. A happy wife There lived she with her lord. It was a home In which an only brother, long since dead, And I, were educated: 'twas to her As the whole world. Its scanty garden plot, The hum of bees hived there, which still she heard On a warm summer's day, the scent of flowers, The honey-suckle which trailed around its porch, Its orchard, field, and trees, her universe!— I knew she could not ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... time to time, though they started out again on fresh roamings - "Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations"! - I remember, - it seems to me now as if it had been some time before I was born, - how the muslin curtains floated in on the evening wind, and the hum and stir of the street came up to my ear; the bustle and activity, though it was evening; and how the distant battlefields of Virginia looked in forlorn contrast in the far distance. Yet this was really the desert and that the populous place; for there, somewhere, my world was. I grew very desolate ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... certainly seemed to be riding as fast as they could before. And all the time the sound of the cannon in front of them grew louder, and the quality of the noise gradually changed. Soon loud explosions began to be distinguishable amid the general hum of battle, and, too, there was an ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Trail • George Durston
... on each side of the stage at Assembly Hall were ablaze with light. There was a hum of girlish voices and gay laughter, and all the pleasant excitement attending an amateur production prevailed. The dressing had been going on for the last hour, and now a goodly company of courtiers and dames stood about waiting while Miss Tebbs and Miss Kane rapidly "made up their faces" with rouge ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... looked out upon a narrow street, in which the ground-floors were, as it is usual, composed of shops, while several persons, having vegetables or grain to sell, were seated upon the ground. The hum of human voices, the grunting of the camels, and the braying of donkeys, kept up an incessant din, and therefore some minutes elapsed before my attention was attracted by a wordy war which took place beneath my window. ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... preceding day; and they had still in their ears the thanksgiving sermons and thanksgiving anthems; all the bonfires had hardly burned out; and the rows of lamps and candles had hardly been taken down. Many, therefore, who did not assent to all that the King had said, joined in a loud hum of approbation when he concluded. [3] As soon as the Commons had retired to their own chamber, they resolved to present an address assuring His Majesty that they would stand by him in peace as firmly as they had stood by him in war. Seymour, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sternly upright on the hard narrow benches; the black-gowned minister, the droning murmur of whose sleepy voice mingles with the out-door sounds of the rustle of leafy branches, the song of summer birds, the hum of buzzing insects, and the muffled stamping of horses' feet; the restless boys on the pulpit-stairs; the tired, sleeping Puritan with his head thrown back in the corner of the pew; the vain, strutting, tithingman with his fantastic and thorned staff of office; and then—the ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... and sows the surprise of a living love in the long-since-unstirred spirit and disaccustomed heart. Soon as the noise of banquet ceased and the board was cleared, they set down great bowls and enwreathe the wine. The house is filled with hum of voices eddying through the spacious chambers; lit lamps hang down by golden chainwork, and flaming tapers expel the night. Now the queen called for a heavy cup of jewelled gold, and filled it with pure wine; ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... been there a minute it seemed to me I could feel The presence of someone near me, and I heard the hum of a reel. And the water was churned and broken, and something was brought to land By a twist and a flirt of a shadowy rod in a ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... Suddenly the hum of the generators stopped and the glow of the tubes in the audioceiver died. Without a second's hesitation, Tom spun around and lunged for the door leading ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... underside of the great woods, and in the turn of the valleys, shadows lingered, which were less actual shadows than blottings of blue light. The birds, busy feeding wide-mouthed, hungry fledglings, had mostly ceased from song. But the drowsy hum of bees and chirrup of grasshoppers was continuous, and told, very pleasantly, of the sunshine and large plenty ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... highest part of the ground, to witness the arrival of the troops, who were now within a quarter of a mile of them on the main road. A hum arose. Belgian officers galloped down the road, and across the fields in all directions; the duke was seen riding towards his expected soldiers, and the scene was life at all points. The pibroch's sound grew louder; and now the bands of the more distant regiments were heard; and the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... all. A Sunday repose prevailed the whole moribund town, peaceful, profound. A certain pleasing numbness, a sense of grateful enervation exhaled from the scorching plaster. There was no movement, no sound of human business. The faint hum of the insect, the intermittent murmur of the guitar, the mellow complainings of the pigeons, the prolonged purr of the white cat, the contented clucking of the hens—all these noises mingled together to form a faint, drowsy bourdon, prolonged, stupefying, suggestive ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... Pickles—nation, not woman. There is just one thing to save this crumbling Republic; give us more paper money—greenbacks on greenbacks, mountain high. Let the Government rent by the month or lease by the year every printing-press in the country—let the machinery sweetly hum as the sheets of treasury-notes fall in cascades to the floor, to be cut apart, packed in bundles, and sent to any citizen who wants them on his own unendorsed note—unendorsed, Pickles, and at two per cent.! Ever study logic, Pickles? No! Well, no matter; my brain's full enough of the stuff ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... plateau, on a moor covered with heather in bloom, the young shepherd lay dreaming in the sun. The serene light, the hum and buzz of tiny creatures, the sweet whispering of the waving grass, the silvery tinkling of the grazing sheep, the mighty beat and rhythm of the earth sang through the dreaming boy unconscious of his divine destiny. Drowsing, his voice and the notes of his flute ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... or hope, but everywhere silence: and what a silence! It is not the stillness of a summer night in the country, nor of a church, nor of a sickroom: it is the silence of death! As you gaze on the scene before you, you are oppressed—almost overwhelmed by its dreary sadness. No insect hum is heard; not even a bird is seen in the still air; the earth, and the atmosphere above it, is one vast region of death. The only link which connects the traveller with humanity, is a long row of the skeletons of mules and horses, which have here left their bones for a guide across the desert. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... away. In these fields of Mr. Tulkinghorn's inhabiting, where the shepherds play on Chancery pipes that have no stop, and keep their sheep in the fold by hook and by crook until they have shorn them exceeding close, every noise is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant ringing hum, as if the city were ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... desirable corner of the room—the professor and Edith, Mr. Bomford and himself. The music of one of the most famous orchestras in Europe alternately swelled and died away, always with the background of that steady hum of cheerful conversation. It was his first experience of a restaurant de luxe. He looked about him in amazed wonder. He had expected to find himself in a palace of gilt, to find the prevailing note of the place an unrestrained and ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... nearer fast, and nearer, Doth the red whirlwind come; And louder still, and still more loud, From underneath that rolling cloud, Is heard the trumpet's war-note proud, The trampling and the hum. And plainly and more plainly Now through the gloom appears, Far to left and far to right, In broken gleams of dark-blue light, The long array of helmets bright, The long ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... look him up to-day. I start operations in Grey Town this afternoon. Did it ever strike you that this place needs stirring up? It's been sleeping ever since it was born. I have come here to make things hum, I ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... comparison was undeserved, but the advice was sound. The blankets spread out on the grass looked inviting and they felt comfortably warm in the sunshine. The breeze was slow, languorous, fragrant, and it brought the low hum of the murmuring waterfall, like a melody of bees. Helen made a pillow and lay down to rest. The green pine-needles, so thin and fine in their crisscross network, showed clearly against the blue sky. She looked in vain for birds. Then her ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... the low green ridges in the churchyard, where the drowsy hum of the threshing in a wheatfield across the road, was the only reminder of the serious business of life. And immediately, as if the beneficent green had enveloped her memory, her weaknesses were effaced and her virtues ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... fortune owes its secret to the Bessemer steel rail. The fishplate instead of the frog, and the steel rail in place of the good old snakehead! "The song of the rail" died out to a low continuous hum when Carnegie began making steel rails and showed the section-hands how to bolt them together ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... This sent a hum of excited jabbering through their ranks, and they fired no more. I stood watching them, and presently I grasped my two hands together and shook hands with myself, to try to convey to them the idea that we were friendly; but it must have carried no meaning ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... lie down. Had our jailers been upon the watch, they must have observed our conversation to die out unusually soon. Yet I doubt if any of us slept. Each lay in his place, tortured at once with the hope of liberty and the fear of a hateful death. The guard call sounded; the hum of the town declined by little and little. On all sides of us, in their different quarters, we could hear the watchman cry the hours along the street. Often enough, during my stay in England, have I listened to these gruff or broken voices; or perhaps ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and in ten minutes he was deeply absorbed in sorting the "daily reports" from the various agencies. He worked steadily, interrupted by an occasional phone call, an order from the chief clerk, the arrival and departure of business associates and clients. Above the hum of subdued office conversation the click of typewriting machines and the incessant buzzing of the desk telephones, he was conscious of hearing the same question repeated with ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... Woo the heart with half so sweet a voice As the bowering arms of the wild-wood larch, Where the clematis and wild woodbine Festoon the flowering eglantine; Where in every flower, shrub, and tree Is heard the hum of the honey-bee, And the linden blossoms are softly stirred, As the fanning wings of the humming-bird Scatter a perfume of pollen dust, That mounts to the kindling soul like must; Where the turtles each spring their loves renew— The old, old story, "coo-roo, coo-roo," Mingles ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... wide-tufted undulating plain-country, rich in all charms of field and town. Waving blooming country of the brightest green; dotted all over with handsome villas, handsome groves; crossed by roads and human traffic, here inaudible or heard only as a musical hum: and behind all swam, under olive-tinted haze, the illimitable limitary ocean of London, with its domes and steeples definite in the sun, big Paul's and the many memories attached to it hanging high over all. Nowhere, of its kind, could you see a grander prospect on a bright summer ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... standing at the gates of the village cattle-pens, amid the trailing dust lately raised by their charges, were awaiting the milk-pails and a summons to partake of the eel-broth. Through the dusk came the hum of humankind, and the barking of dogs in other and more distant villages; while, over all, the moon was rising, and the darkened countryside was beginning to glimmer to light again under her beams. What ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... with blossom, framing the quiet fields, and swaying flowers and grasses, and the hum of bees. ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... might better 'a' stayed to hum for the past ten years than be runnin' wild over the ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... ahead of them, hands in his pockets, his cigarette glowing. Behind him walked Sandy. Wyatt finished his smoke and started to hum a tune. ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... ... and a daughter ... very beautiful daughter ... hum—hum. Many men wanted her ... wouldn't have them ... can't take her by force ... very strong. Thought of taking her to wife myself ... hum—hum. But she is too strong for me ...
— Eskimo Folktales • Unknown
... by scraping the right foot upon the floor and bowing low as they entered the school-room; the girls upon like occasions equally faithful in the practice of a bewitching little "curtsey" which only added to their charms; the "studying aloud," the hum of the school-room being thereby easily heard a mile or two away; the timid approach to the dreaded master with the humble request that he would "mend a pen," "parse a ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... promise not to talk about it for a year and a day—not even to me—and at the end of that time, why we'll all go and see what's in it. No," he said, "you mustn't go to look at it every now and then—that would spoil the charm. Let me see. This is the twenty-eighth—a year and a day—hum." And he made his calculations. Then he said: "By the way, Mary, don't you and the children ever get hungry between meals? If you were to take bread and meat, and make up sandwiches to take on your excursions, they'd never be missed. I'd see to it," he said, "that they weren't ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... had hitherto prevailed ashore was pierced by a shrill whistle, in response to which the whole face of the bush bordering the open space at once began to spit flame, while the air around us hummed and whined to the passage of a perfect storm of bullets and slugs, among which could be detected the hum of round shot, apparently nine-pounders, the gig weathered the storm unscathed; but upon glancing back I saw that the other boats had been less fortunate, there being a gap or two here and there where a moment before a man had sat, while certain ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... were very cruel, dear Buzz," said little Hum; "let us take him to our Queen, and she will tell us how to show our anger for the wicked deeds he did. See how bitterly he weeps; be kind to him, he ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... who, with a Persian carpet before them, persist in looking at its seamy side, and finding nothing but odds and ends, imperfect joints, unsatisfactory combinations of color; the real pattern entirely escaping them. The shrill utterances of such men rise above the low hum of steady good work, and are taken in Germany as exact statements of the main ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... keep the ground this fine New Year's Day. Next come a strong body of Kafir police, trudging along through the dust with odd shuffling gait, bended knees, bare legs, bodies leaning forward, and keeping step and time by means of a queer sort of barbaric hum and grunt. Policemen are no more necessary than my best bonnet: they are only there for the same reason—for the honor and glory of the thing. The crowd is kept in order by somebody here and there with a ribboned wand, for it is the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... sharp explosions as one of the gasolene engines was started. This was followed by the hum of an electric dynamo, and the whizz and ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood
... hurrying on to London, its market people halting to drink, its farmers, horsemen, and foot travellers. So, as one's humour is, one can have whichever phase of life one pleases: quietude or bustle; solitude or the busy hum of men: one can sit in the principal room with a tankard and a pipe and see both these phases at once through the windows that open upon either. But through all these delightful places they talk of leading railroads: a sad thing, I am sure: quite ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... "Um hum." The other lady sighed reflectively. "I on'y wisht my po' husban' could er live to enjoy de ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... beneath hangings of silk and festoons of flowers; the wealthy display their dazzling luxury, the poor drape themselves proudly in their rags. Everything is light, harmony, and perfume; the sound is like the hum of an immense hive, interrupted by a thousandfold outcry of joy impossible to describe. The bells repeat their sonorous sequences in every key; the arcades echo afar with the triumphal marches of military bands; the sellers of sherbet ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... emblem of the resurrection, when this perishing body should be raised in glory), and the shadows of the trees were lengthening on the grass. Every sound was in sweet accordance with the scene; the soft twittering of the birds as they sought their resting-places for the night, the quiet hum of the insects, and the sweet murmuring of the brook which ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... the speaker broke into loud laughter; then, to further relieve his bubbling joyousness, he began to hum a song. As he worked his song grew louder, until its words were audible to the girl in ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... Shanw, ready for the frequent fray. "They won't have your hum-drum old church fregot[3], perhaps, but you come and see, and hear Hughes Bangor, Price Merthyr, Jones Welshpool. Nothing to give them, indeed! Why, Price Merthyr would send your old red velvet cushion at church flying into smithireens in five minutes. Haven't I heard him. He begins ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... cataract where the sawyer may plant his mill, and make a path from it to join some great road, there is a human habitation, and the sounds that belong to it. Thence, in winter nights, come music and laughter, and the tread of dancers, and the hum of many voices. The Norwegians are a social and hospitable people; and they hold their gay meetings, in defiance of their arctic climate, through every season of ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... himself on his back at once, clasping his hands under his head and gazing up into the rustling storeys above. About his head was a low persistent hum, a vibration of a sound of many parts. Above were only the intense silences of ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... grass! In a blur the violets pass. Whispering from the wildwood come Mayflower's breath and insect's hum. Roses carpeting the ground; Thrushes, orioles, warbling sound: Swing me low, and swing me high, To the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Ned! Start the motor!" cried Tom, and a moment later the hum of machinery was heard, while the police and the spy broke into a run, ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Glider - or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure • Victor Appleton
... as well go through Lorraine crying, Mulleygrubs, Mulleygrubs, who'll buy my Mulleygrubs!' So we fared on, bad friends. But I took a thought, and prayed him hum me one of his naughty ditties again. Then he brightened, and broke forth into ribaldry like a nightingale. Finger in ears stuffed I. 'No words; naught but the bare melody.' For oh, Margaret, note the sly malice of ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... wind moving very gently among the trees, making a soft rustling noise. I could scarcely believe in the difference there is between this quiet sound and the roaring of the wind in a storm. Then I heard the wild bee's hum, and the little tiny noises made by the small creatures that live in the wood. I heard our gardener sharpening his scythe, and the trickling of ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... force of magnetism A Russian poem's mechanism My scholar without aptitude At this time almost understood. How like a poet was my chum When, sitting by his fire alone Whilst cheerily the embers shone, He "Benedetta" used to hum, Or "Idol mio," and in the grate Would lose his ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... common bush is aflame with God. So hearts that have forsaken the good see nothing but a God-forsaken world; and, in this same world, hearts that are lifted up find Him everywhere, they see Him in the movements of history, in the forces of nature, they hear Him in the hum of commerce and in the silence of the fields, in every human voice they catch His tone. He is ever in the midst. He is more than a force, a dream, a thought. He is to men to-day what He was to men when He walked their streets and touched their sick; all that we think He would ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... blood finds its way into the vein and so does not escape into the tissues. Even if a haematoma forms it seldom assumes a great size. In time a swelling is recognised, with a palpable thrill and a systolic bruit, loudest at the level of the communication and accompanied by a continuous venous hum. ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... the bedroom with the child. Slipping him into his little nightdress she made him comfortable for the night, after which she went back to the dining room to keep Jake from thinking she had anything to cry about. There was an added hum of voices, and she went in ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... however, at the road-side chapel, we must proceed to the fair, where the "busy hum of men" announced the approach of the mayor and corporate body to make ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... solemn hills, far removed alike from the ambitious strife of cities and the bloody spectacles of war. Lying amid the solitudes of the mountains, where no sounds fall on the ear but the bleating of flocks, the lowing of cattle, the hum of bees, the baying of a watch-dog from the lonely homestead, the murmur of hidden rills, the everlasting rush of the waterfall as it plunges flashing into its dark, foaming pool, pastoral are eminently peaceful scenes. Indeed, ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... trapan[obs3], trepan; kidnap; let in, hook in; nousle[obs3], nousel[obs3]; blind a trail; enmesh, immesh[obs3]; shanghai; catch, catch in a trap; sniggle, entangle, illaqueate[obs3], hocus, escamoter[obs3], practice on one's credulity; hum, humbug; gammon, stuff up*, sell; play a trick upon one, play a practical joke upon one, put something over on one, put one over on; balk, trip up, throw a tub to a whale; fool to the top of one's bent, send on a fool's errand; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... door). "Business of importance!" Hum! I'm glad I'm prepared with a good basin of soup. There's no doing business well upon an empty stomach. Perhaps the business is to lend cash; and I've no great stomach for that. But it will be an honour, to be ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... conquered height Died out the battle's hum; Vainly 'mid living and the dead We sought our leader dumb; It seemed as if a spectre steed To win that ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... shrill musical hum; they raced down the runway; dipped for a second toward the water; rose, and sailed swiftly up and on toward the dark line of Mexico, that lay in the evening shadow cast by the curved surface of the ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... grime-rubbed, the corners and eaves were rusted with rain, and the child who stared at them from the kitchen window was smeary-faced. But beyond the barn was a clump of scarlet geraniums; the prairie breeze was sunshine in motion; the flashing metal blades of the windmill revolved with a lively hum; a horse neighed, a rooster crowed, martins flew in and ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... season on Sunday afternoon, about a score of visitors were assembled in Mrs. Cosgrove's drawing-rooms—there were two of them, with a landing between. As usual, some one sat at the piano, but a hum of talk went on as undercurrent to the music. Downstairs, in the library, half a dozen people found the quietness they preferred, and among these was Mrs. Widdowson. She had an album of portraits on her lap; whilst ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... it; I hold duels in abhorrence, as unjustifiable acts of violence, and savage devices of revenge. I have offended against my own conviction,—but, transported with passion at his infamous charges, I was not master of my reason; I accused hum of his perfidy; he denied it; I told him I had it from my father,—he changed the subject to pour abuse upon him; I insisted on a recantation to clear you; he asked by what right? I fiercely answered; by a husband's! ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... little," he confessed as he tuned the neglected instrument, "but it seemed sort of sacrilegious—after coming home and finding my father gone and the ranch about to go. However—why sip sorrow with a long spoon? What's that ballad about the old-fashioned garden, Miss Kay? I like it. If you'll hum it a few times—" ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... the time he rescued Buck, but with the continued warm weather even the slight limp left him. And here, lying by the river bank through the long spring days, watching the running water, listening lazily to the songs of birds and the hum of nature, Buck ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... came up after awhile, and streamed in through the vines of the porch. The hazel eyes slowly closed as Elizabeth began to hum an ...
— The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows Johnston
... normally the scene of quiet and orderly activity, where the day's work was done to the clicking of typewriters and the hum of subdued voices, but now the rooms were empty and the only sound to be heard was the heavy tread of Varr himself as he walked through the main office to the small room where his own desk was located. He frowned at the difference, ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... great city's lumbering noise Arises with confusing hum, And whistling shrill of butchers' boys; My day begins, my bird ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... pleased me more than at times, when the sultry heats of the day forbid alike study and recreation, to choose for myself some remote and shaded spot, and lying along upon the flowery turf, soothed by the drowsy hum of the summer insects, gaze upon this gorgeous pile of oriental grandeur, and lazily drink in the draughts of a beauty, as I believe, no where else to be enjoyed. When at such hours Julia or Fausta is my companion, I need not say in how great degree the pleasure is heightened, nor what ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... these, I remember, on which I used to cogitate profoundly, was how to defeat an enemy without having arms. My preoccupation with this question, amidst the hum of the boys reciting their lessons, comes back to me even now. If I could properly train up a number of dogs, tigers and other ferocious beasts, and put a few lines of these on the field of battle, that, I thought, would serve very well as an inspiriting prelude. With our personal prowess let loose ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... the charging rack Had forced the moon upon her back; The wind piped up a naval ditty; And the lamps winked through all the city. Before that house, where lights were shining, Corpulent feeders, grossly dining, And jolly clamour, hum and rattle, Fairly outvoiced the tempest's battle. As still his moistened lip he fingered, The envious policeman lingered; While far the infernal tempest sped, And shook the country folks in bed, And tore the trees and tossed the ...
— Moral Emblems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sunbright head!" The stones of Thebes and Memphis will find voice: "Osiris comes: Oh tribes of Time, rejoice!" And social architects who build the State, Serving the Dream at citadel and gate, Will hail Him coming through the labor-hum. And glad quick cries will go from man to man: "Lo, He has come, our Christ the artisan, The King who loved the lilies, ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... land sakes don't do that again, Zoeth," he protested. "That's the tenth 'Ah hum' you've cast loose in a mile. I know we're bound to a funeral but there ain't no need of tollin' the bell all the way. I don't like it and I don't think Marcellus would neither, if ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... rays could penetrate the massy net-work of leaves and branches forming the roof of our fairy passage. Not a single bird could be seen, either seated or on the wing; nor was even a chirp distinguishable above the dreamy hum of millions of mosquitoes floating about, in a calm so profound, that it seemed as if the surface of the water had never been disturbed since the Creation. The air, though cool, felt so heavy and choky, that, by the time we had scrambled to the end of this strange tunnel or watery lane, ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... moment. Whenever Mr Scatchard took his walks abroad, he was always accompanied by either his wife or niece, who, when they finally piloted him home, would wear a look of self-conscious triumph. When Mavis came down to breakfast, before setting out for New Cross, there was a hum of infinite preparation. Mr Scatchard was greasing his hair; gorgeous raiment was being packed into a bag; the final polish was being given to a silver trumpet. Both Mrs Scatchard and her niece, besides being cloaked and bonneted, ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... post in the middle of the school-room for her quiet village-home in Normandy. Madame herself remained almost entirely invisible, shut up in the sanctity of her own rooms; and so the whole house had a sense of stillness that seemed only heightened by the glory of the autumn sunshine, and the hum of bees and rustle of leaves ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... sardonically. "Hum! He is his father's son, not a doubt of that. 'Twill be a most worthy successor to my Lord Ostermore. But the lady? Tell me of the lady. How comes she linked ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... hillside. By and by the streets were fashioned From the model of McAdam, And adorned the youthful city. Richmond, Mulberry, and Paulding, Danville, Lexington, and Water, Stanford, Campbell, and Crab Orchard, Were the windings of the city. And the noisy hum of traffic, And the roll of cart and carriage, Told of barter and of bargain, Told of human gains and losses, Scared away the beasts and birdlings, Locked and dammed and bridged the rivers, Chained the rolling streams and rivers. Schools were opened, where the ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... afternoon. Store and hotel keeper, citizens in white shirts and broadcloth, jostled blue-shirted cattle men, while here and there a petty politician consulted with the representative of a Western paper. The smoke of cigars drifted everywhere, and the listless heat was stirred by the hum of voices eager and strident. It was evident that the assembly was in an expectant mood, and there was a murmur of approbation when one newspaper man ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... to the farther end, where the great cedar trunk stood. As I went a board creaked under my feet, and I heard—or fancied I heard—a faint rustle inside the trunk. I began to hum a tune, and moved about among the trunks, raising and shutting the lids, as if I were looking for something. Now at last I was beside the dreadful chest, and in another instant I had turned the key. ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... the religion of Abraham, which the pagan Arabs had polluted with idolatry, the Jews in corrupting their holy books. At the same time he heard a Voice, and sometimes he felt a noise in his ears like the tinkling of bells or a low deep hum, as if bees ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... gasolineless Sabbaths supervened were we really able to examine the village and see what it is like. Previously we had been kept busy either dodging motors or admiring them as they sped by. Their rich dazzle of burnished enamel, the purring hum of their great tires, evokes applause from the Urchin. He is learning, as he watches those flashing chariots, that life truly is almost as vivid as the advertisements in the Ladies' Home Journal, where the shimmer of earthly pageant ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... the glory of this Danaean shower and half-closed her eyes to stare up at the wonder of it. Presently she heard the sound of twigs and leaves being crushed under advancing feet, but she did not look up, only started to hum a little tune, though she could not hear it for the rising beat of her own heart ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... in some matters. There were some warm discussions between the ladies, and a spirit of rebellion took possession of the wife. This was emphasized by the fact that she found herself very lonely and longed secretly for the hum and stir of the office; for the deference and the courtesy she had received there. Further, the distracted husband, in his roles of husband and son, found himself displeasing both his wife and his mother. ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... the world. I walk every day amongst immense ranks of people, with as much tranquillity as you do in your green alleys. The men I meet with make the same impression on my mind as would the trees of your forests, or the flocks of sheep grazing on your common. The busy hum too of these merchants does not disturb one more than the purling of your brooks. If sometimes I amuse myself in contemplating their anxious motions, I receive the same pleasure which you do in observing ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... his voice: "Come to books!!!" And they came. Not to come meant "war and rumors of war." The backless benches, high above the floor, groaned under the weight of irrepressible young America; the multitude of mischievous, shining faces, the bare legs and feet, swinging to and fro, and the mingled hum of happy voices, spelling aloud life's first lessons, prophesied the future glory of the State. The curriculum of the old field school was the same everywhere—one Webster's blue backed, elementary spelling book, one thumb-paper, one stone-bruise, ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... and elastic character, as the soft enthusiasts who suffer under it are fond of believing. It yields to unexpected and striking impressions upon the senses, to change of place, to such scenes as create new trains of association, and to the influence of the busy hum of mankind. In a few minutes, Quentin's attention was as much engrossed by the variety of objects presented in rapid succession by the busy streets of Liege, as if there had been neither a Countess Isabelle nor a Bohemian in ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... but against those dear to him—his mother and sister. While this pained him, he began to wonder that they should be so much the subject of the conversation. He could not tell what was said of them, but in the hum of voices their names repeatedly reached his ear. He had lain about an hour on the banqueta, when the door opened, and the two officers, Vizcarra and Roblado, stepped within the cell. They were ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... the din of labor augments on every side; the streets are thronged with man, and steed, and beast of burden, and there is a hum and murmur, like the surges of the ocean. As the sun ascends to his meridian, the hum and bustle gradually decline; at the height of noon there is a pause. The panting city sinks into lassitude, and for several hours there is a general repose. The windows are ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... she replied: "why the miners in our town here must never even hum a tune; we must never drive more than just two miles from the gate; and no amusing book, no poem, no novel is ever let come into the house. And added to all this we are perpetually frightened with being told that such a number of thoughts ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... rather ho-hum to me; they are quick to respond to hygienic treatment and easy to resolve. I've fixed lots of them. But an inflamed gallbladder is in no way ho-hum to the person afflicted with it. I've been frequently told that there are no ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... enjoy this trip," purred Isobel Baring, nestling comfortably among the cushions of her deck chair. A steward was arranging tea for two at a small table. The Kansas, with placid hum of engines, was speeding evenly through ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... safely discard all but one. Some fishermen were pulling nets on the bay about half a mile outside the mouth of the Bush River last night. About eleven, a boat running without lights passed them. They said that they could not hear an engine running, but just a dull hum and the gurgle of a propeller. They hailed it, but got no answer. It faded away into the darkness and they think it was headed toward the mouth of the Bush River. They had their nets up and reset in another hour but ...
— Poisoned Air • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... the trees, the men of Keeling build exquisitely modeled canoes. By far the best workmanship in boat-building I saw on the voyage was here. Many finished mechanics dwelt under the palms at Keeling, and the hum of the band-saw and the ring of the anvil were heard from morning till night. The first Scotch settlers left there the strength of Northern blood and the inheritance of steady habits. No benevolent society has ever done so much for any islanders ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... Charley quickly. "Hum!" he said, "I'm not at all sure but what you're totally feminine and that I'm ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... veritably to hum with secret and, to judge by the pitch of its rumour, well-nigh panic activity. One divined a scurrying as of rats about to desert a sinking ship. Untoward events had thrown this establishment into a state of excited ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... flower in a garden as full of flowers as I have known how to make it. We keep no bees, but if I lived in a hive I should hardly hear more of their music. All the bees in the neighbourhood resort to a bed of mignonette, opposite to the window, and pay me for the honey they get out of it by a hum, which, though rather monotonous, is as agreeable to my ear as the whistling of my linnets. All the sounds that nature utters are delightful,—at least in this country. I should not perhaps find the roaring of lions ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... London in 1787 the society had just begun operations on a paid-up capital of L35,000. One of the directors, Isaac Hawkins Browne, M.P., was actually down in Scotland choosing the sites for the villages; and Wilberforce was already almost hearing the "busy hum" of the little hives of fishermen, coopers, boat-builders, and ropemakers, whom they were settling ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... when the hum of voices had ceased "I never thought as how I'd have to get up here and make a speech to-night or I might have taken to the woods. Howsomever, mother and Susan says as it's gettin' late it's about time we had some supper. Somewhere in the ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... lately decided before Miller, J., Doe presented Roe a subscription paper, and urged the claims of suffering humanity. Roe replied by asking, When charity was like a top? It was in evidence that Doe preserved a dignified silence. Roe then said, "When it begins to hum." Doe then—and not till then—struck Roe, and his head happening to hit a bound volume of the Monthly Rag-bag and Stolen Miscellany, intense mortification ensued, with a fatal result. The chief laid down his notions of the law to his brother justices, who unanimously replied, "Jest so." The chief ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... road-side tempted me to enter into a bye-lane, and take a nearer view of it. A village church, embosomed in a chesnut wood, just rose above the trees on the top of a hill; the setting sun was on its casements, and the foliage of the wood was burnished by the golden reflection. The distant hum of the village green was just audible; but not so the French horn, which echoed in full melody through the groves. Having rode about half a mile through a narrow sequestered lane, which strongly reminded me of the half-green and half-trodden bye-roads in Warwickshire, I came ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... vigorous exercise of leaping water-falls and forging up boiling rapids had developed these sturdy mountaineer trout into prodigies of strength and endurance. Even now my nerves tingle to the tips of my toes as in fancy I hear my reel hum or see the tip of my five ounce split bamboo bend so as to almost form ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... intertwined, Of wildest texture, blacken'd o'er with age, Bound them their mantle green the climbers twine. Beneath whose mantle—pale, Fann'd by the breathing gale, We shield us from the fervid mid-day rage, Thither, while the murmuring throng Of wild bees hum ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... fire-crackers to propitiate the river dragon, the boat was shoved from the jetty, the sail hoisted, and we were soon slowly stemming the broad current of the Yang Tsze. On our right was Hankow, with its million or more inhabitants, the hum of the great city following us for miles; and the mouth of the Han, its surface so covered with junks that their masts resembled a forest, and only a narrow lane of water was left for the passage of boats. Just beyond the Han was Han Yang, once a fine city, but now in ruins, one of the ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... having withdrawn itself, a hum of many voices filled the court-house; a munching of biscuits, a sipping of flasks. The silence of suspense no longer reigned. The struggle was virtually over, and the victim was only waiting his doom. It was ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... reading and sitting-rooms are filled with well-dressed men, guests and citizens, who have sauntered here from all parts of the city. Four-fifths are smoking, and the air is hazy with the "vapor of the weed." The hum of conversation is incessant, but the general tone is well-bred and courteous. In the farther end of the great hall a group of stock brokers may be seen comparing notes, and making bargains for the sale and purchase of their fickle ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... (honourable I mean) sit knotting under his Nose when he was writing, and so gave occasion for the changing it instead of Bawdy, that that odious word might not offend her, tho the Phrase was made Nonsence by it—hum—No faith, the case seems to me now to be quite otherwise, and really the effect of downright Hypocrisy, unless done as I said for the last reason; for those that have read his Book, may find sprinkling up and down the other words extreamly plain upon occasion, Ribaldry ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... within him sinking. On the plain He look'd, and there, alarm'd, the watchfires saw, Which, far advanc'd before the walls of Troy, Blaz'd numberless; and thence of pipes and flutes He heard the sound, and busy hum of men. Upon the ships he look'd, and men of Greece, And by the roots his hair in handfuls tore To Jove on high; deep groan'd his mighty heart. Thus as he mus'd, the wisest course appear'd, With Nestor, son of Neleus, to confer, If they some scheme in council might ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... sung to sleep with it by mother, by father, and by servants, and it was one of the first things she herself learned. There was music in the race, and this bright little one had her full share of it, and soon could hum her parent's triumphal march, the talisman of her family, ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... familiar with death, death by the sniper's bullet, by machine gun and shell, by bayonet and poison gas. This was different. It was not war. It was something that touched them more deeply than any of the killing they had seen in war. The low hum of foraging bees about the door, the foxglove swaying in summer airs, the hushed peace of the distant hills and nearer forest,—this was no background for violence and death. It shocked them, chilled and depressed them. Hollister felt a new sort ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... bird, your voice must be heard; Hum out to the flow'rs my lay. As o'er them you hover, oh! say that I love her, And say ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... "You didn't hear what the old lady said at this point, I suppose. I was sitting next to her. She was really a whole play by herself. When Jumbo went smashing against the side, the old lady gave a grunt. 'Hum, that wull sort ye a doot.' Oh! she ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... torrent of ecstatic life, the river had paused in the valley to rest, dreaming, perchance, of the long cool shadows in the uplands, the far altar-fires of daybreak. There were pleasant things to do in the valley, to lie at full length, basking in the sun, to hum a bit of the old music, to touch gently the harp-strings of the marsh grass and rushes, dimpling with pleasure at the faint answer, to reflect every passing mood of cloud and sky, even to hold the little clouds as a mother might, upon its deep and tender bosom. There were lily-pads to look after, ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... Paradise now came up to me again, followed by a square man, middle-aged, and hum-drum, who, I found was Lord Say and Sele, afterwards from the Kirwans, for though they introduced him to me, I was so confounded by their vehemence and their manners, that I ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... an hour overtime to-night an' Sunday," McGuffey informed the skipper. "An' that hurts me. I don't mind takin' a poke at you myself but I'll be shot if I'll stand idly by an' see somebody else do it. With your kind permission, Scraggs, I'll climb into my dungarees an' make things hum in that engine room." ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... liebe Gott. She had a sweet, clear voice, and it seemed to float to heaven. I sang low, merely to sustain her. Aunt Gredel, who could never rest doing nothing, began spinning; the hum of her wheel filled up the silences, and we all felt happy. When one song was ended, we began another. At three o'clock, Aunt Gredel served up the pancake, and as we ate it, laughing, like the happiest ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... before him. On looking at the galleries, he saw that they were crowded with ladies of rank and fashion. Every thing having been now ready, the lawyers, each with his brief before him, and each with a calm, but serious and meditative aspect, the Clerk of the Crown cried out, in a voice which the hum of the crowd ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... minutes the silence that prevailed was interrupted by a general movement in the outer crowd, when presently the Leather-Stocking made his appearance, ushered into the criminals bar under the custody of two constables, The hum ceased, the people closed into the open space again, and the silence soon became so deep that the hard breathing of the ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... believe in you, my Soul ... Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat;... Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice. I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... Melissy, hum at last, hey? Why didn't you stay till mornin'? Party business keepin' me up here so late waitin' for you—when I'm eny most tired to death ironin' and workin' like a slave all day—ought to ben abed an hour ago. Thought ye left ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... each bird has his, Across the girding city's hum. How green under the boughs it is! How thick the tremulous sheep ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... of Old Age, and some Long for its Respite from the Hum And Clash of sordid Strife—O Fools, The Past should teach them ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... duskiness, and the weariness of eight hours in the saddle, began to tell, and conversation flagged and finally died out utterly. The squeak-squeaking of the saddles grew very distinct; occasionally somebody sighed, or started to hum a tune and gave it up; now and then a horse sneezed. These things only emphasised the solemnity and the stillness. Everybody got so listless that for once I and my dreamer found ourselves in the lead. It was a glad, new sensation, and I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... morning, midday or sunset rambles, and often dominate the landscape in a way I never before thought of—fill the long lane, not by scores or hundreds only, but by thousands. Large and vivacious and swift, with wonderful momentum and a loud swelling, perpetual hum, varied now and then by something almost like a shriek, they dart to and fro, in rapid flashes, chasing each other, and (little things as they are,) conveying to me a new and pronounc'd sense of strength, beauty, vitality and movement. Are they in their mating season? or ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... utter blackness of the room, Mike the Angel could see nothing, and he could hear nothing but the all-pervading hum of the ship's engines. But he could still ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... family, and met her often in the service of the parish, as well as in her official character at the Homestead. It so chanced that one Sunday afternoon they found themselves simultaneously at the door of the school-house, whence issued not the customary hum, but ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sat on the grass, behind a cabin that had been abandoned, where they could see the track while they themselves were hidden from anyone approaching by the road they had come. And before long the rails began to hum. Then, in the distance, there was the ...
— A Campfire Girl's First Council Fire - The Camp Fire Girls In the Woods • Jane L. Stewart
... did so. We followed suit instantly. Then Hilda rose and began walking slowly round the big drum in the nave, saying aloud at each step, in a sort of monotonous chant, like a priest intoning, the four mystic words, "Aum, mani, padme, hum," "Aum, mani, padme, hum," many times over. We repeated the sacred formula after her, as if we had always been brought up to it. I noticed that Hilda walked the way of the sun. It is an important point in all ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... four hundred at Goodwood, and there were some of my creditors I simply had to give a little to, or they would have pulled me up altogether. You talk about nerves, Ena, but, hang it all, it's enough to give anyone the hum to lead the sort of life I've had to lead for the last few years. I'm nothing more nor less ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the rocks with a haste that was born of nervous tension. She did not see the men again—it was needful to pick a path down the steep descent very carefully—and when she came, breathless, upon the clump of birches among which the tents were pitched it was evident from the hum of voices that the strangers had already arrived. Pushing in among the trees, she stopped, with her heart beating unpleasantly fast, ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... sort of fever-pitch, and when I got to work on that play I was at another. No writer while exercising an abnormal faculty is quite sane. His brain is several pitches above normal and his nerves are like hot taut wires—that hum like the devil. If this were not the case he would not be an imaginative writer at all. But he certainly is in no condition to reveal himself to a woman. I have made wild and sporadic love to you—sporadic is the word, for between my ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... then proud, she would be more than ever conspicuous against the background of brilliant toilets, fine jewels, and assured manners which the family would produce for the occasion. As a matter of fact, there was a perceptible hush in the hum of talk as she made her entry into the drawing-room, ostensibly led by Philip Wayne, but really leading him. As she paused near the door, half timid, half bewildered, looking for her hostess, it did not help her to feel at ease to ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... and cools our forehead. It is so dark that we can only see San Giorgio by the light reflected on it from the Piazzetta. The same light climbs the Campanile of S. Mark, and shows the golden angel in a mystery of gloom. The only noise that reaches us is a confused hum from the Piazza. Sitting and musing there, the blackness of the water whispers in our ears a tale of death. And now we hear a plash of oars, and gliding through the darkness comes a single boat. One man leaps upon the landing-place without a word and disappears. There ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... at school, in the summer. It made her think of rounders in the hot school garden, singing-classes in the large green room, all the class shouting "Gather roses while ye may," hot afternoons in the shady north room, the sound of turning pages, the hum of the garden beyond the sun-blinds, meetings in the sixth form study.... Lilla, with her black hair and the specks of bright amber in the brown of her ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... populous. The harbor was full of ships and boats of all sorts, some lying at the stone quays, others leaving port, others entering. Galleys passed and repassed, and merchant ships with their clumsy sails, and small fishing-boats. From afar arose the deep hum of a vast multitude and the low roar that always ascends from ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... very tyrant, I, an arrant tyrant, If e're I come to reign; therefore look to't, Except you do provide me hum enough And Lour to bouze with: I must have my Capons And Turkeys brought me in, with my green Geese, And Ducklings i'th' season: fine fat chickens, Or if you chance where an eye of tame Phesants Or Partridges are ...
— Beggars Bush - From the Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... only I might change places with Oceana! If I could get away to some South Sea island, and be my own mistress and live my own life. [Takes photograph.] Oceana! I'm wild to see you! I want to see you dancing. Your Sunrise Dance... and to your own music! [Begins to hum the Sunrise Dance.] ...
— The Naturewoman • Upton Sinclair
... grey-green leaves of a wild olive-tree stood out against the dark shadows of the ilex. Clarke, in the deep folds of dream, was conscious that the path from his father's house had led him into an undiscovered country, and he was wondering at the strangeness of it all, when suddenly, in place of the hum and murmur of the summer, an infinite silence seemed to fall on all things, and the wood was hushed, and for a moment in time he stood face to face there with a presence, that was neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled, ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... on Bredon, And still the steeples hum. "Come all to church, good people,"- Oh, noisy bells, be dumb; I hear ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... of you Obstructs my cold, unbiased view, And keeps me from My hard though hum- Ble task, I do not murmur nor complain I do not ululate nor feign A love for vin Or what is ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... in the long dining-room amid the hum of many voices, the glare of many lights, and the click of the glasses, as the wine was going around, when a young man who sat across the table from me rose with his glass poised between ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... one of the most welcome and beautiful sounds of spring. Scarcely have the trees showed their buds, when, in the still April mornings, or toward nightfall, you hear the hum of his devoted wings. He selects not, as you would predict, a dry and resinous log, but a decayed and crumbling one, seeming to give the preference to old oak-logs that are partially blended with the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... considerable silence. He glanced up in an ashamed sort of way, at the other, and saw him standing quite upright and still, again with his back to the fire, looking out across the room. From outside came the hum of the thoroughfare—the rolling of wheels, the jingle of bells, the cries of human beings. He waited in a kind of shame for Dick's next words. He had not put all these feelings into coherent form before, even to himself, and they sounded now even more fantastic than he had thought ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... opened to admit the men, and somebody claiming Kitty's attention at the moment she turned away without reply. For a few minutes the conversation became more general until, after a brief hum and stir, congenial spirits sought and found each other and settled down into little groups of twos and threes. Somewhat to Nan's surprise—and, although she would not have acknowledged it, to her annoyance—Peter Mallory ensconced ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... morning, sunny, calm, inspiriting, and presently Tom began to hum. After a time Henry perceived that Tom was humming the same phrase again and again: 'Some streets are longer than others. Some streets are longer ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... other engagement. All ready, Dale?" for the chauffeur was in his seat, and the engine was purring with the placid hum of a machine ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... She seemed to be listening to something a long way off. Through the open windows of her softly shaded drawing-rooms, odourous with flowers, came the rippling of water falling from a fountain in the conservatory, the lazy hum of a mowing machine on the lawn, the distant tinkling of a hansom bell in the Square. But these were not the sounds which for a moment had changed ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... great spaces of emptiness lay gleaming in the mild sunlight, exhaling freshness like that of dewy lawns. When, under the glare of noon, they lay slumbrous, they were impressive by their prodigality of width and scope; in the bustle and hum of dusk, with the cafes filling, and spilling over on to the pavements, he could not tire of them; but at night, the mystery of their magic enthralled him. How could one sleep in such a city? The Puerto del Sol was then a sea of dark fringed with shores ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... gusto he had not known for years. The jolting, the shaking, the tossing had started his sluggish blood and cleared his business-befogged brain. His food was spiced with the aroma of the hemlocks, and when they took to the road again he began to hum tunes. ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... figure vanished, through the same stages of indistinctness, back to the globular, lamp-like whiteness, till it faded into nothingness. Before it had quite faded away, the face of a woman arose, indistinct and calm. The same emphatic hum, though in a subdued note, indistinct and dim. The same paralysis of voice and muscle, the same strange force, as if it were overshadowing me. With the disappearance of this second and far less interesting figure, I recovered my power of ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... the boys, taking their mugs of tea, retired into the shelter prepared for them, and sat and talked over the events of the day, and as to the work for to-morrow; and then, wrapping themselves up in their blankets, lay down to sleep, listening for some time dreamily to the hum of conversation of the men, who were sitting smoking round the fire, and to the hoarse roar of the innumerable frogs in the ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... went into Kenge's office," said Richard, "and if I were placed under articles to Kenge, I should have my eye on the—hum!— the forbidden ground—and should be able to study it, and master it, and to satisfy myself that it was not neglected and was being properly conducted. I should be able to look after Ada's interests and my own ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... Jesus is condemning here. The 'judging' of which He speaks sees motes in a brother's eye. That is to say, it is one-sided, and fixes on faults, which it magnifies, passing by virtues. Carrion flies that buzz with a sickening hum of satisfaction over sores, and prefer corruption to soundness, are as good judges of meat as such critics are of character. That Mephistophelean spirit of detraction has wide scope in this day. Literature and politics, as well as social life with its rivalries, are infested ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... in vanity; and so deeply, that at his public suppers—all the Court present, musicians also—he would hum these self-same praises between his teeth, when the music they were set to ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... chair, and gazed round at the strange-looking walls and mysterious pictures, and up to the chandelier at the ceiling; then rose, and opened the door, and looked down the lighted passage; but only heard the hum from the roomful below, scattered voices, and a hushed ivory rattling from the closed apartments adjoining. I stepped back into the room, and a terrible revulsion came over me: I would have given the world had I been safe back in Liverpool, fast asleep in my old bunk ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... was mute and dusty, with a tangle of strings; but the Stranger set it against his knee, and began to mend it deftly, talking the while in murmurs as a brook talks in a covert of cresses. By and by as he fitted a string he would touch and make it hum on a word—softly at first, and with long intervals—as though all its music lay dark and tangled in chaos, and he were exploring and picking out a note here and a note there to fit his song. There was trouble in his voice, and restlessness, and a low, eager striving, and ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... a war in France; Everywhere men bang and blunder, Sweat and swear and worship Chance, Creep and blink through cannon thunder. Rifles crack and bullets flick, Sing and hum like hornet-swarms. Bones are smashed and buried quick. Yet, through stunning battle storms, All the while I watch the spark Lit to guide me; for I know Dreams will triumph, though the dark Scowls ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... floating mills anchored securely in the river. Each mill—a small house with sloping roof, and with so few windows that one wonders how the millers ever manage to see their grist—is built upon two boats. The musical hum of its great wheel is heard for a long distance, and warns one of the approach toward these pacific industries. The miller is usually on the lookout, and sometimes, when a large steamer is coming up, and he anticipates trouble from the "swell" which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... Big hulking men slouched by, and ragged little girls walked gingerly through the confusion with foaming buckets of beer in their hands. There was a clatter and garble of foreign tongues and brogues, shrill cries, quarrels and wrangles, and the Pit pulsed with a great and steady murmur, like the hum of the human ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... different employments at school, and afterwards desiring me in my turn to relate to him all manner of things about Germany. He repeats his amo, amas, amavi, in the same singing tone as our common school-boys. As I happened once when he was by, to hum a lively tune, he stared at me with surprise, and then reminded me it was Sunday; and so, that I might not forfeit his good opinion by any appearance of levity, I gave him to understand that, in the hurry of my journey, I had forgotten the day. He has already shown me St. James's Park, ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... the house: and the hum of the wheel and the singing Suddenly ceased; for Priscilla, aroused by his step on the threshold, Rose as he entered, and gave him her hand, in signal of welcome, Saying, "I knew it was you, when I heard your step in the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... possession. Ha! hum! here are ladies: where will we stow our feet? I declare Will is on their skirts already, with more green slime than is carried on the breast of a pond. I believe he thinks them baggage—lay figures, as they've turned aside their heads. Gentlefolks for a wager! ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... of the right hand on the thumb of the left)—I went to the sand. I got there when the sun was gone down. The camel lay down, and so did I lay down on the sand. We watched all night. I fear no one but God!—(Here was a general hum of approbation.)—Two hours before the fidger, (break of day) I looked up and saw pass by me, at a distance of from here to The Spring, nine Bughar (wild-bullocks). They came and went, and went and came, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... the gerratist queeriosity in the livin' world—a wild mare without no hair— captered on the roarin wild prahayries of the far distant West by sixteen Injuns. Don't fail to see this gerrate exhibition. Only fifteen cents. Don't go hum without seein the State Fair, an' you won't see the State Fair without you see my show. Gerratist exhibition in the known world, an' all for the small sum ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... the gay idlers who were wandering about the balconies or through the hotel grounds; while laughs and little shrieks, uttered by the children as their pursuing nurses caught them up for bed, mingled not unpleasantly with the silvery hum arising from the fashionable crowd and the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... gorgeous with the crimson streaks which accompanied its setting. Standing in the waggon, Cathelineau could see the crowds of hurrying royalists rushing along the road, wherever the thick foliage of trees was sufficiently broken to leave any portion of it visible, and he could hear the eager hum of their voices both near ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... with a golden light on its long levels and a purple glamour on its hills. And after he had left her, she went with a light heart down the unpaved street that she had lately traversed in unseeing bitterness. The very hum of the mine cars was full of good cheer; children splashed joyously in the ditch; magpies gossiped; the blacksmith-shop rang with ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... literary blow flies will pounce upon the errors with delight, and, buzzing with the ecstasy of infernal joy, endeavour to hum their readers into a belief of the profundity of their critic erudition;—I shall nevertheless, with Churchill, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... grounds, we are finding reason to think otherwise. You are about to make an observation at table and some member of your family makes it before you; you are thinking of a certain tune and someone begins to hum it; you have a certain purpose in mind and, lo, the same thought finds expression in someone else, despite all probabilities. Oh, you may remark, This is only thought transference. Precisely, but what are you except your thought? All being, remember, is conscious ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... beneath the guillotine, or fell by cold-blooded murder at the altar where it ministered. Infuriated mobs hunted them like bloodhounds; and the cloisters of convent and monastery, which had hitherto been disturbed only by footsteps gliding quietly from cell to chapel, or the hum of voices mingling in devotion, now echoed the tread of armed ruffians and resounded with ribaldry and imprecations. An old man, who was for a time my teacher, told me many a tale of those days. He had narrowly escaped, once, by concealing himself under the floor of his room. He said that he felt ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... an expensive suite at an apartment hotel near the Fabians, and much to little Mr. Alexander's joy, although much to Mrs. Alexander's disgust, they settled down to a hum-drum life that winter. She sighed as ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... as a sign that he will open the wide jaws of hungry war, even so did Agamemnon heave many a heavy sigh, for his soul trembled within him. When he looked upon the plain of Troy he marvelled at the many watchfires burning in front of Ilius, and at the sound of pipes and flutes and of the hum of men, but when presently he turned towards the ships and hosts of the Achaeans, he tore his hair by handfuls before Jove on high, and groaned aloud for the very disquietness of his soul. In the end he deemed it best to go at once to Nestor son of Neleus, ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... on the other, the public road, with its coaches hurrying on to London, its market people halting to drink, its farmers, horsemen, and foot travellers. So, as one's humour is, one can have whichever phase of life one pleases: quietude or bustle; solitude or the busy hum of men: one can sit in the principal room with a tankard and a pipe and see both these phases at once through the windows that open upon either. But through all these delightful places they talk of leading railroads: a sad thing, I am sure: quite ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... started to hang up his hat and coat, but even as his hand was poised half-way to the hook it became paralyzed. Simultaneously Abe looked up from the column of the Daily Cloak and Suit Record and Miss Cohen, the bookkeeper, stopped writing; for the hum of sewing machines, which was as much a part of their weekday lives as the beating of their ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... an odd, light footstep drawing near. In the course of his nightly patrols, he had long grown accustomed to the quaint effect with which the footfalls of a single person, while he is still a great way off, suddenly spring out distinct from the vast hum and clatter of the city. Yet his attention had never before been so sharply and decisively arrested; and it was with a strong, superstitious prevision of success that he withdrew into the entry of ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... without, and through the open casement beats warmly upon the floor within. The birds sing in the joyousness of full-robed summer; the drowsy hum of the bees, stealing sweets from the honeysuckle that bowers the window, lulls the air to a gentle quiet. Her breathing scarce breaks the summer stillness. Yet, she knows it is nearly over. ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... There was a hum of approval from the speaker's supporters, whose possessions lay near the higher end of the valley, and dissenting growls from those whose boundaries lay below. After several of the ranchers from the lower valley had ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... for very exhaustion his brain had stopped its tormenting work. He lit a fire and sat by it, huddled in his coat, smoking, dozing, not able really to sleep for cold and hunger. The bright stars, flung all about the sky, mildly regarded hum. Coyotes mourned their loneliness and hunger near and far, and once, in the broken woods above him, a mountain lion gave its blood-curdling scream. Prosper hated the night and its beautiful desolation, he hated the God that had made this land. He cursed the dawn when it came delicately, spreading ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... days the weather changed again and became glorious. Even the Oddities would now join the crowd that hung out on the alighting-board, and would sing of work among the merry, merry blossoms till an untrained ear might have received it for the hum of a working hive. Yet, in truth, their store-honey had been eaten long ago. They lived from day to day on the efforts of the few sound bees, while the Wax-moth fretted and consumed again their already ruined wax. But the sound bees never mentioned these matters. They knew, if they did, the Oddities ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... of the hill, just where the road begins to dip again, at the spot where the last view of the town and the bay is obtained, the lonely traveller paused. He turned round, and for a while stood gazing wistfully at the scene he had left behind. The hum of the town's life, the sudden shoutings of the children at their play, even, as he fancied, the eternal pathos of the ocean's murmuring, were borne upwards to him on the evening breeze. Far off, among the trees, twinkled a ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... the greens of the grasses and leaves and the yellows and blues of the field flowers. It was warm, a spring day, with none of the discomfort of summer heat. Jubilant, Roger spun around in circles, inhaling the fragrance of the field, listening to the hum of insect life stirring back to awareness after a season of inactivity. Then he was running and tumbling, barefoot, his shirt open, feeling the soft grass give way underfoot and the soil was good and rich ...
— Pleasant Journey • Richard F. Thieme
... appellation. No! this little wanderer is held too dear by us all as the harbinger of spring for aught but praise to be bestowed on his mellow notes, which, though full and soft, are powerful, and may on a calm morning, before the everyday hum of human toil begins, be heard a mile away, over wood, field, and lake. Toward the summer solstice his notes are on the wane, and when he gives them forth we often hear him utter them as if laboring under great difficulty, ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various
... much lumber those Germans can carry around in their heads all their lives, and never work it up into anything. It's a pity they couldn't do the acquiring, and let out the use of their learning to a few bright Americans. We could make things hum, if we could arrange 'em ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... "Ha! Hum! I wouldn't like to see myself!" spoke Uncle Wiggily, and he crawled away from the hole just in time, for the snake stuck out his ugly head and was about to bite the rabbit. It was the same snake that had ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Travels • Howard R. Garis
... walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory, and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this or that morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it; that is to say, agreeably to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of the various ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... best to approach a place which might be in the hands of an enemy. Her boat was tied at the dock. She had the half-ruined distillery yet to pass. It had stood under the cliff her lifetime. As she drew nearer, cracks of light and a hum like the droning of a beehive magically turned the old distillery into ...
— Marianson - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... is probable that his appreciation will never be as keen as it would have been if he had gathered his literary stock in trade at the same time that his senses were first opening to the world. Then the skies and the flowers, the song of birds and the hum of insects, the quiet reaches of still lakes and the roaring surge, gave to him the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... religionist, and wonderful orthodox; though between you and me, if his heart was looked into, he cares as little for priests and the good of the Church as he does for the Grand Sultan of the Turks. However, whatever that—hum!— Morgatch advises him to do he does. Morgatch brought forward plenty of witnesses to prove that the heretics had been seen in Saveleff's house, and that he and his wife and daughter had served them with food; and what is more, read out of the Bible, and prayed with them. Such ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... the unequal connection between his sublimated soul and its ungainly tenement. During this, deathlike preparation, Mr. Wharton, with a feeling nearly allied to that of his son, led Sarah from the apartment. His retreat was noticed by the divine, in a kind of scornful disdain, who began to hum the air of a popular psalm tune, giving it the full richness of the twang that distinguishes the Eastern [Footnote: By "Eastern" is meant the states of New England, which, being originally settled by Puritans, still retain many distinct shades of ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... stood outside the cabin, with the moon high in the sky, a gentle wind sweeping up the canyon and loose masses of clouds drifting in front of the orb of night. Here and there a light twinkled from a shanty and the hum of voices sounded faintly in their ears. Further off, at the extreme end of the settlement, stood the Heavenly Bower, with the yellow rays streaming from its two windows. They could picture the group gathered there, as it had ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... the right foot upon the floor and bowing low as they entered the school-room; the girls upon like occasions equally faithful in the practice of a bewitching little "curtsey" which only added to their charms; the "studying aloud," the hum of the school-room being thereby easily heard a mile or two away; the timid approach to the dreaded master with the humble request that he would "mend a pen," "parse a verb," or "do ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... I began to hum and haw nervously, but he interrupted: "It doesn't matter to me, you know, I'm only asking from curiosity; and I don't expect you to give a date. But is it a matter of days or weeks? I can see it isn't one ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... rule is not to attract a large number of students, to put up imposing buildings, to have endowments, and fill chairs with learned specialists; to grant many degrees, and to keep the hum of a teaching staff and of a student body alive in the ears of a community, marking the college group by flags and colors, cap and gown, processions and occasions. These things are right, but are mainly accessory. We have not all of a university ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... sweeps across it. The larks are so multitudinous that no distinct song can be caught, and amidst the confused melody comes the note of the thrush and the blackbird. A constant under-running accompaniment is just audible in the hum of innumerable insects and the sharp buzz of flies darting past the ear. Only those who live in the open air and watch the fields and sea from hour to hour and day to day know what they are and what they mean. The ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... city wall, the blue car was the one note of modernity; but hardly had we turned in at a great gate worthy to open in welcome for Queen Jeanne of Naples, or Bertrand du Guesclin, than we were in the hum of twentieth-century life. I resented the change, for one expects nothing, wants nothing, modern in Avignon; but in a moment or two we had left the bright cafes and shops behind, to plunge back into the middle ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... summer, and seem, for a brief space, to reanimate the torpid energies of nature. The sun glowed in mid-day fervor, and myriads of the insect tribes, revived by his delusive smile, wheeled their giddy circles in the light, and sent their busy hum upon the calm, clear air. The wild bee, provident for future wants, had sallied from his wintry hive, and sipped from every honied cup, to fill the treasures of his waxen cell; and a thousand birds of passage folded their downy pinions, and delayed their distant flight, till bleaker ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... friends." A good propaganda to induce desertions and surrenders! The Italians generally had the mastery over the Austrians in the air. Their machines, and especially their Capronis, could always be distinguished from the Austrians' by the deeper hum of ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... has not taken his wife into his confidence as to this mystery," thought Ginevra, who, after replying to the young wife's speech with a gentle smile of incredulity, began to hum a Corsican "canzonetta" to cover the noise that was made ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... world was a lonely thing, so wide and tall and empty! And so bare, so bitter bare! Somehow he had never dreamed of the world as lonely before; he had fared forth to beckoning hands and luring, and to the eager hum of human voices, as ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... the windows of their high, castellated poops. Their great guns gleamed; mast and spar and rigging made network against the blue; high in air floated bright pennants and the red cross in the white field. To and fro plied small boats, while over the water to them in the wherry came a pleasant hum of preparation for the morrow's sailing. Upon the Cygnet, lying next to the Mere Honour, and a very noble ship, ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... as in the prison, the atmosphere of the lower deck was close and unhealthy, and the girl, pausing to listen to the subdued hum of conversation coming from the soldiers' berths, turned strangely sick and giddy. She drew herself up, however, and held out her hand to a man who came rapidly across the misshapen shadows, thrown by the sulkily swinging lantern, to meet her. ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... were very lively aboard the old hooker, and, though in the main unpleasant, the grandeur of the sea in the tempest made up for all discomforts. The flash of the lightning, the roar of the thunder, the hum and whistle of the wind through the rigging, and the swish of the seas as they dashed themselves to spray against the sides of the ship—all this made an impressive chorus, more stirring even than the roar of cannon and ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... directly above their red ship. Danny saw three round holes open in the white shell—the three outlets that the Infant had predicted. It had descended noiselessly, but now there came from within a high-pitched whining hum. The dreaded heat and ray! They were about to see their own ship destroyed! And, as for themselves—! Danny was still waiting for the first, devastating blast of intolerable heat, when ...
— The Hammer of Thor • Charles Willard Diffin
... boys here with Arthur?" Ruth went on, noticing for the first time the hum of voices ...
— Glenloch Girls • Grace M. Remick
... consciousness was that of a sound of gurgling, running water, and of a buoyant, heaving, plunging motion; of flashing sunshine coming and going upon my closed eyelids; of the vibrant hum of wind through taut rigging and in the hollows of straining canvas; of a murmur of voices, and of the regular tramp of footsteps to and fro on the planking overhead; and for the moment I thought that I was aboard the Tern, and just awaking from a sleep during which I had been haunted ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... pleasure began to hum in my head, my knees gradually gave way beneath me, until I was on my knees before the two women. My hands were unconsciously extended as if to fend them off, and each of them seized a hand, pulled me to the round bench at the back of the control cabin. They stroked my cheeks, began to murmur ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... having anybody stand up to him as you have. As a general thing Denboro jumps when he snaps the whip. You didn't, and he couldn't understand why. He is the kind that respects anything they can't understand. Then, too, Nellie likes you, and she's his idol, you know. Ah hum!" ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... wages; though of course their industry was partly due to my "gringo" presence. We addressed them as inferiors, in the "tu" form and with the generic title "hombre," or, more exactly, in the case of most of the American bosses, "hum-bray." The white man who said "please" to them, or even showed thanks in any way, such as giving them a cigarette, lost caste in their eyes as surely as with a butler one might attempt to treat as a man. I tried it on Bruno, ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... there came a loud hum of angry voices from without. They were the voices of the vikings calling aloud for the blood of him who had slain ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... Hearing her hum very softly to herself, he asked what she sang. She said, her mother's favorite hymn, and gave ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... hadn't found him out he might have crawled up and shot me in the eye through this hole. I won't hold my eye here all the time!" said he, rising, and to his astonishment Sneak stood at his elbow, whither he had glided softly, his quick ear having caught the hum of Joe's soliloquy, and his curiosity leading him to find out the meaning of the ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... the boat, under sail, was doing little more than barely stem the current, they gradually became aware of a low, faint roar, at first scarcely distinguishable above the rustle of the wind in the trees aloft and the buzzing hum of the innumerable insects which swarmed in the forest and hovered in clouds over the surface of the water. But as the boat continued to creep upstream the roar gradually increased in intensity, until at length, as they rounded a bend and entered another reach of the river which extended ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... but lo! amid the press, The whirl and hum and pressure of my day, I hear Thy garments sweep, Thy seamless dress, And close beside my work and weariness Discern Thy gracious form, not far away, But very near, O Lord, to help ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... now head of the Field Columbian Museum, was its business manager. These men, with Field, were given carte blanche to surround themselves with a staff and news-gathering equipment to make the Tribune "hum." And they did make it hum, so that the humming was heard far beyond the borders of the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... the symbol of her new nationality that tree whose green gives the spring its earliest freshness, whose autumn dying tints are richer than the clouds, sunset, whose life-stream is sweeter than honey, and whose branches are drowsy through the long summer with the scent and the hum of bee and flower! Still the long line of the Canadas admits of a varied spring. When the trees are green at Lake St. Clair, they are scarcely budding at Kingston, they are leafless at Montreal, and Quebec is white with snow. Even between Montreal ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... thousand fires gleam through the faint moonlight. Our band is playing near the General's quarters, its strains are echoed by a score of regimental bands, and their music is mingled with the numberless noises of camp, the hum of voices, the laughter from the groups around the fires, the clatter of hoofs as some rider hurries to the General, the distant challenges of the sentries, the neighing of horses, the hoarse bellowing of the mules, and the clinking of the cavalry anvils. This, at last, is the romance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... Graylingham Wood or on the river that ran through it. After long basking among the cowslips, or beneath the whispering branches of an elm, whose shade I was robbing from the staring cows around, or lying on my hack in a boat on the river, listening to the birds and the insect hum and all the magic music of summer in the woodlands, I used all at once to feel as though the hand of a great enchantress were being waved before me and around me. The wheels of thought would stop; all the senses would melt into one, and ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... had finished my tale, he resumed: "I first thought the whole of this a hum, but I find I was mistaken. Your conference with M. Werner may lead to a reconciliation between us and Austria; what you said must open the eyes of M. Metternich. To convince him completely, I will write to him; and depict with so much clearness and truth the real ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... noise of the singing outside became so great that it was impossible to hear Babberly at all. McNeice tilted his chair back and began to hum the tune. Malcolmson beat time to the singing with his forefingers. Their action seemed to me to be intentionally insulting to Babberly. The crowd outside reached the end of a verse ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... Channel Islands. Nelson's disposition not to form any opinion of his own respecting the propriety of orders was thus evidenced: "What we have been sent out for is best known to the great folks in London: to us, it appears, only to hum the nation and make tools of us, for where we have been stationed no enemy was likely to be met with, or where we could protect our own trade." There can be no doubt that not only was the practical management of the Navy at this time exceedingly bad, but that no sound ideas even prevailed upon ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... from the heart of the city to string these towns together, is paved with brick, and its traffic, for the most part, is the great tin-tired dump-carts of the quarries and steel interurban electric cars, which hum so heavily that even the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... could hear fragments of the music which the band was playing to the gay idlers who were wandering about the balconies or through the hotel grounds; while laughs and little shrieks, uttered by the children as their pursuing nurses caught them up for bed, mingled not unpleasantly with the silvery hum arising from the fashionable crowd and the festal clang of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... rise an' come An' sit down where the branch be low; A bird do sing, a bee do hum, The flowers in the border blow, An' all my heart's so glad an' clear As pools be when the sun do peer: As pools a laughin' in the light When mornin' air is swep' an' bright, As pools what got all Heaven in sight So's my heart's ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... twelve o'clock, a lovely warm morning. The first hum of the season was just beginning, like the big orchestra of London tuning up. There seemed a sort of suppressed excitement in the air. People of average spirits appeared unusually happy; the very highly strung seemed just a little wild; their eyes dancing, their ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... none, save when the bittern rose from its nest, amidst the long reeds or sedgy grass, or the moor fowl flew over the surface of the inky water, which here and there collected into pools. The feeble hum of insects filled the air, but all ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... below. The view from the bridge takes in the white farm-houses with their emerald setting of rich grain-fields and meadowlands, the distant forge with its belching smoke-stacks, the winding Oswegatchie, and the distant blue hills. If the month happens to be August, the traveler may hear the cheerful hum of busy industry, the swinging cradles of the harvesters or the steady roll of the reaper. Upon a day, late in this richest of summer months—August—in the year of our Lord 1854, Willard and his uncle Henry were slowly wending their way towards Fullerville—the former with ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... its sponsors; the editorial offices of the peevish and bilious newspapers, which deny principles and right motives to all save themselves; a regiment of alleged humorists who make jokes about the mother-in-law and other sacred relations of life; an opera-box full of the people who hum every number of Wagner and Verdi through, and keep other people from hearing the singers; row after row of theatre-goers who come in late and trample over the virtuous folk who have arrived punctually; any number of theatrical managers who mistake ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... governors and magistrates still flourish. They put me in mind of Old Sarum, where the representatives, more in number than the constituents, only serve to inform us that this was once a place of trade, and sounding with "the busy hum of men," though now you can only trace the streets by the color of the corn, and its sole manufacture ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... anxious solicitude. The terrible punishment inflicted on the rioters in 1863 seemed to have been forgotten by the mob, and it had evidently resolved to try once more its strength with the city authorities. Around the Orange head-quarters a still deeper excitement prevailed. The hum of the vast multitude seemed like the first murmurings of the coming storm, and many a face turned pale as the Orangemen, with their banners and badges, only ninety in all, passed out of the door into the street. John Johnston, their marshal, mounted on a spirited horse, placed himself ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... in the inspired account of Lydia's conversion is, its accomplishment by divine agency. It is stated that the LORD opened her heart. The effect is not ascribed to the apostle Paul, or his illustrious coadjutors in the Christian ministry. They might speak with the tongue of angels, and hum with the zeal of seraphs; to them might be given in trust "the everlasting Gospel," which, like the apocalyptic angel, they were carrying through "the midst of heaven" to the inhabitants of the earth, "to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people;" they might indeed possess the ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... gayest season of that fashionable watering-place. At this time the hotels are thronged with summer tourists returning homeward from the more northern resorts. Though the broad piazzas of Cozzens's great hotel were crowded by the elite of the city, there was a hum of admiration as Christine first made her round on her father's arm; and in the evening, when the spacious parlor was cleared for dancing, officers from the post and civilians alike eagerly sought her hand, and hundreds of admiring eyes followed as she swept through ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... condemning here. The 'judging' of which He speaks sees motes in a brother's eye. That is to say, it is one-sided, and fixes on faults, which it magnifies, passing by virtues. Carrion flies that buzz with a sickening hum of satisfaction over sores, and prefer corruption to soundness, are as good judges of meat as such critics are of character. That Mephistophelean spirit of detraction has wide scope in this day. Literature and politics, as well as social life with its rivalries, are infested by it, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... summons—cagy boy that he was—the telephone rang oftenest for Nick. Because of the many native noises of the place, the telephone had a special bell that was a combination buzz and ring. It sounded above the roar of outgoing cars, the splash of the hose, the sputter and hum of the electric battery in the rear. Nick heard it, unheeding. A voice—Smitty's or Mike's or Elmer's—answering its call. Then, echoing through the grey, vaulted spaces of the big ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... must have stood there some seven centuries, and would have found beauty in the very narrow early English windows, as well as in the general proportions of its little chancel; while its solitary position, far from the hum of the village, and within sight of no habitation, except a glimpse of the gray manor-house through its circling screen of sycamores, has in it something solemn and appropriate to the last resting-place of the silent dead. Sweet violets, both purple and white, grow in ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... a concession. He was leaning on her shoulder, and her face and downcast eyes were turned toward him so sweetly—said I to myself—Hum!" ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... "Our Father," by those beloved ones who have since gone to the more perfect worship. Holy was that distant choral praise, even to the most thoughtless; and when it, in fact, was ended, in the instant's pause, during which the ear awaits the repetition of the air, they caught the noontide hum and buzz of the myriads of insects who danced away their lives in the glorious day; they heard the swaying of the mighty woods in the soft but resistless breeze, and then again once more burst forth the merry jests and the shouts of childhood; and ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... an agreeable hum of chatter from these early comers when I found myself welcoming Mrs. Judge Ballard and half a dozen members of the Onwards and Upwards Club, all of them wearing what I made out to be a baffled look. From these I presently managed to gather that their guest ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... there came the usual night hum of the city, with now and then an indescribable ring in it, weird and unearthly, as if some unwonted sounds of a terrible nature were going ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... landscapes still, But softer beauty sits on every hill: I see bright meadows, decked in livelier green, The yellow corn-field, and the blossomed bean: A hundred flocks o'er smiling pastures roam, And hark! the music of the harvest home! Methinks I hear the hammer's busy sound, The cheerful hum of human voices round; The laughter and the song that lightens toil, Sung in the language of my native isle! The vision leads me on by many a stream; And spreading cities crowd upon my dream, Where turrets darkly frown, and lofty spires Point to the stars and sparkle in their fires! ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... the modish swains of France have sung against thee, as the SOW CHALLENGED ATHENE. They never knew the shepherd's life, the long winter nights on dried heather by the fire, the long summer days, when over the parched grass all is quiet, and only the insects hum, and the shrunken burn whispers a silver tune. Swains in high-heeled shoon, and lace, shepherdesses in rouge and diamonds, the world is weary of all concerning them, save their images in porcelain, effigies how unlike thy ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... boys arter all, Si," remarked the one they supposed was Ed Harkness, as he swayed slightly to and fro, while coming to a halt. "I guessed as haow yuh must a be'n mistook w'en yuh said it mout be ther hull outfit. Les sit down, Si, an' make us tuh hum." ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... minutes in a sort of trance, gazing down into the lovely valley. I could observe no signs of human habitation. No smoke rose over the trees, and no noises issued forth, except the voices of Nature, uttered in the songs of birds and the hum of falling waters. It seemed as though man had never desecrated this isolated paradise by ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... cargo to save the ship, but what a motion you gave her when you made her ride the waves—a motion as rhythmic as the dance of a goddess! Wayworth took long London walks and thought of these things—London poured into his ears the mighty hum of its suggestion. His imagination glowed and melted down material, his intentions multiplied and made the air a golden haze. He saw not only the thing he should do, but the next and the next and the next; ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... of their respective owners in the open thoroughfare, which is at this part very wide. Auctioneers were here busily engaged in the disposal of their merchandise, which comprised every variety of produce and manufacture, home and foreign, from a yard of linsey-woolsey, "hum spun" as they termed it, to a bale of Manchester long cloth, or their own Sea-Island cotton. The auctioneer in America is a curious specimen of the biped creation. He is usually a swaggering, consequential sort of fellow, ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... evening in Greenwich Park. He asked me, I suppose, by way of trying my disposition, 'Is not this very fine?' Having no exquisite relish of the beauties of Nature, and being more delighted with 'the busy hum of men,' I answered, 'Yes, Sir; but not equal to Fleet-street.' JOHNSON. 'You ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... There was a low hum of applause in the schoolroom, a triumphant expression on McSnagley's face, a grave shadow on the master's, and a comical look of disappointment reflected from the windows. M'liss skimmed rapidly over her astronomy, and then shut the book with a loud ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... automobile had proven its superiority to any of the seventeen cars which he at present maintained in his establishment. He had got three of these new cars, and while Montague sat upon the quarter-deck of the Triton and gazed at the magnificent scenery of the river, he had in his ear the monotonous hum of Devon's voice, discussing annular ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... publishes them from time to time for the pleasure of other children. The secret of his success is partly that he knows that even small children like a story to be an adventure; partly that he understands how their own romances, the things they picture or hum to themselves when well-meaning adults are not worrying them, or rather, trying to amuse them, begin—wherever they may end!—with a perfectly tangible object, such as a pillar-box, a rag-doll or a toy locomotive. One of "The Jolly Rhymster's" ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... in Sydney harbor. The wharves were crowded with shipping from all parts of the world which were already filled with workmen busily engaged in unloading the cargoes. The hum of the thousands in the city beginning their daily work, rose into the air and spread far over ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... task he must perform) to detect the child's step from the man's, the slipshod beggar from the booted exquisite, the lounging from the busy, the dull heel of the sauntering outcast from the quick tread of an expectant pleasure-seeker—think of the hum and noise always being present to his sense, and of the stream of life that will not stop, pouring on, on, on, through all his restless dreams, as if he were condemned to lie, dead but conscious, in a noisy churchyard, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... interest as soon as Miriam was launched was a comfort so deeply implied that it only added to intimacy. The window stood open on the little balcony, and when the sun had left it Peter and Miriam could linger there, leaning on the rail and talking above the great hum of Paris, with nothing but the neighbouring tiles and tall tubes to take account of. Mrs. Rooth, in limp garments much ungirdled, was on the sofa with a novel, making good her frequent assertion that she could put up with any life that would yield her these two conveniences. There were romantic ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... detailed to him the plan of a very moral and aristocratical novel she was preparing for the press, and continued holding forth, with her eyes half shut, till a long-drawn nasal tone from the reverend divine compelled her suddenly to open them in all the indignation of surprise. The cessation of the hum of her voice awakened the reverend gentleman, who, lifting up first one eyelid, then the other, articulated, or rather murmured, "Admirably ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... a delightful ride, and a much more delightful tete-a-tete. This Lee appears to be a hum-drum, disagreeable Creature. Tea is ready, and I ...
— Journal of a Young Lady of Virginia, 1782 • Lucinda Lee Orr
... Earth, clad in russet, scorn'd the lively green: The plague of locusts they secure defy, For in three hours a grasshopper must die: No living thing, whate'er its food, feasts there, But the cameleon, who can feast on air. 300 No birds, except as birds of passage, flew; No bee was known to hum, no dove to coo: No streams, as amber smooth, as amber clear, Were seen to glide, or heard to warble here: Rebellion's spring, which through the country ran, Furnish'd, with bitter draughts, the steady clan: ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... reeking shuttle and booming bar Keep time in the hum of the toiling hive,— The men of the deep, while the travellers ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... moment as she sat half-crouching on the divan, her hands locked, her face set and stony, her eyes lowered. He sighed gently and turned away. He paced to the parapet and looked out upon the city bathed in the white glare of the full risen moon. There arose thence a hum of sound, dominated, however, by the throbbing song of a nightingale somewhere in his garden and the croaking of the frogs by the pool in ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... his shape so as to give rest to his tired muscles, and the pleasantly cool night breeze that floated through the leaves of the tall palms breathed upon his sun-scorched cheeks. Now and then there was the hum of mosquitoes, but they did not molest him; and as he lay listening to the distant boom of the surf and watched the great twinkling stars he now and then nearly lost consciousness, and the tall columns of the cocoa-nut trees took ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... on him a moment steadily, and a look of bewilderment came into his face. But he turned away again to the simmering pots. The boy went to the window and, leaning upon the sill, began to hum softly a sort of chant, while he watched a lizard running hither and thither in the sun. As he hummed, the old man listened, and presently, with his medicines in his hands and a half- startled look, he came over ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... all seemed so still but the buzz and hum of distant voices that I determined to venture, and undoing my hot hand I unfolded the little scrap of paper, upon which, written closely but clearly, were the ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... should say that Providence directs you to keep 'em both to hum," said Mr. Underhill; — "but that's not my affair. Well, I'm going. — I hear you are goin' to be ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... water running into it. Its luminous mist seemed to reach to the uttermost borders of the land; everything came this way. Large dragon-flies hovered over the bog in metallic splendor; gnats danced above it like careless shadows. A ceaseless hum rose from it, and below lay the depth that had fostered them, seething so that he could hear it ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... lands one high and dry. Still I could see no daylight. They could not hope to keep me on this preposterous charge. A single wire to Berlin would settle the matter, but then there would be a delay. I would not reach Paris until six o'clock at night. Wedel had insisted that I be there at noon. Hum! ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... ponderous pillars, and she and her companions went up the ample stairway and into several uncomfortably crowded, flower-bedecked rooms. Ida, however, was getting used to the lights and the music, the gleam of gems, the confused hum of voices, and the rustle of costly draperies, and, though she admitted that she liked it all, they no longer had the same exhilarating effect on her. She danced with one or two men, and then, as she sat alone for a moment, Gregory Kinnaird crossed the room toward her. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... descries a troop of slaves loitering in the half-desert fields; the primaeval forest recurs at every turn; society seems to be asleep, man to be idle, and nature alone offers a scene of activity and of life. From the right bank, on the contrary, a confused hum is heard which proclaims the presence of industry; the fields are covered with abundant harvests, the elegance of the dwellings announces the taste and activity of the laborer, and man appears to be in the ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... the outside. Indeed he had not been the first to rise and take tale of his companions, to ascertain which one had occasion to open it and go without. With such a chief few would admit negligence. The day passed without notice. Confidence was restored. Now from the outside was heard a hum of voices. "On his lordship's business! On his lordship's business!" The cries came together with an irruption of yakunin into the entrance hall, Jinnai and his men promptly sprang to arms. A scattered ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... sleepers, they, in their turn, give a good deal of annoyance. The man who talks about politics at great length, is only one of the common bores of the world transported into a club. But the man with a voice which in ordinary conversation pierces through all the hum of voices, like a clarion note in battle, would be a bore anywhere. If he were in the wilderness of Sinai, he would annoy the monks in the convent near the top. His voice is one of those terrible, inscrutable scourges of nature, like the earthquake and the mosquito, which tax our poor ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... he were being prepared for some inhuman biological experiment. A cage of terminals was fitted to his head and a thousand small electrodes adjusted to contact with his skull. The faint hum of equipment supported the small surge of apprehension ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... "Missionary Crowd" had entertained the ladies of the Senatorial party. It was Mrs. Hodgkins, the tall blonde woman, who had asked the question. The scene came back to her vividly—the broad lanai, the tropic flowers, the noiseless Asiatic attendants, the hum of the voices of the many women and the question Mrs. Hodgkins had asked in the group next to her. Mrs. Hodgkins had been away on the mainland for years, and was evidently inquiring after old island friends of her maiden days. "What has become of Susie Maydwell?" ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... barked and snarled in the narrow staired streets. Came the cry of the donkey-boys. Came the cry of the water-sellers. Came the shouts of the young Syrians over the gammon game. Loped the laden camels. Tramped the French soldiers. Came a new hum.... ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... cattle, which were so fat that their hides glistened a long way off, and when he had got past them he came to a fine, big palace. He walked through many rooms without meeting anybody. At last he heard the hum of a spinning wheel, and when he entered the room he found the eldest Princess sitting there spinning copper yarn; the room and everything in it was ...
— East of the Sun and West of the Moon - Old Tales from the North • Peter Christen Asbjornsen
... gardens I transplant them, and I treasure them like gold. One cluster bears light-coloured bloom; another bears dark shades. I sit with head uncovered by the sparse-leaved artemesia hedge, And in their pure and cool fragrance, clasping my knees, I hum my lays. In the whole world, methinks, none see the light as peerless as these flowers. From all I see you have no other friend more intimate than me. Such autumn splendour, I must not misuse, as steadily it fleets. My gaze I fix on you as I am ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... were unlocked, and then like a small whirlwind Pat scrambled out, rushed to Dick's feet and grovelled there in an ecstasy of joy. "Hum, considering you say this boy only stole him this morning, they've got uncommon fond of one another! Call him and see if he'll come to you." But the showman's wiles were in vain. Pat would not ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis
... to be talked over, and so they rowed out with the net. When they reached the deepest part of the water, she began to hum the words of the magic rhyme, altering the words to suit the longings ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... "three-bottle period" of the British aristocracy? and as for the masses, the only national sentiment in common was that of military glory earned by British heroes in foreign wars. In more domestic affairs, it was a long hum-drum grind in settled grooves—deep ruts in fact—from which there seemed no escape. Yet it was a period in which great forces had their birth—forces which were destined to exercise the widest influence upon our national, social, and even ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... on the cud of contemplated abasement, he waded round the car, satisfying himself that there was nothing else out of gear; and apprehensively cranked up. Whereupon the motor began to hum contentedly: all was well. Flushed with this success, Maitland climbed aboard and opened the throttle a trifle. The car moved. And then, with a swish, a gurgle, and a watery whoosh! it surged forward, up, out of the river, gallantly up ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... her world. The usual throng of men of fashion, guardsmen, literary men, and budding politicians were bending over the chairs of their feminine acquaintances, or standing about in little groups talking amongst themselves. The clatter of teacups was mingled with the soft hum of voices; the pleasantly shaded room was heavy with the perfume of many flowers. People said that Lady Meltoun was the only woman in London who knew how to keep her rooms cool. It was hard to believe that outside the streets and pavements were ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Flam. Hum! thou art a soldier, Followest the great duke, feed'st his victories, As witches do their serviceable spirits, Even with thy prodigal blood: what hast got? But, like the wealth of captains, a poor handful, Which in thy palm thou bear'st, ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... the noise ceased, and we thought that most of the men slept. After that was no sound but the wash of the waves, and the hum of the sail, and the creak of the great steering oar as Asbiorn met the luff of the ship across the long, smooth sweep ...
— A Sea Queen's Sailing • Charles Whistler
... on all the duties and responsibilities of their new relation, and above all, urging them to the attainment of that higher liberty with which Christ maketh his children free. In every quarter we were assured that the day was like a Sabbath. Work had ceased; the hum of business was still, and noise and tumult were unheard on the streets. Tranquillity pervaded the towns and country. A Sabbath indeed! when the wicked ceased from troubling, and the weary were at rest, and the slave was free from his master! The planters informed us that they went ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... yards, hundreds of frogs commence to croak loudly and continue steadily, with a few pauses to breathe, until daybreak. Hundreds of monkeys screech shrilly in the trees and millions of mosquitoes hum steadily within an inch or two of one's ears. All manner of animal cries are heard in the forest and the hippos blow loudly as they rise to the surface to breathe. As a matter of fact, the noise at midnight in the forest, ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... almost left me at a terrible outcry from one end of the great hall, a cry not of human beings but of wild beasts, muffled and menacing. The dancing, the music, the hum of voices ceased, and a thick silence as of direst fear fell upon them all. Then there came a loud crackling and shattering of glass, a woman's scream, the first of very many. This for aught I know might have been a usual ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... of agony which fell in holy benediction on the grass of Gethsemane, shall the hum- 48:12 blest or mightiest disciple murmur when he drinks from the same cup, and think, or even wish, to escape the exalt- ing ordeal of sin's revenge on its destroyer? Truth and 48:15 Love bestow few palms until the consummation of ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... was surrounded by the whole pack of wolves, and was obliged "to tree," to save his bacon. He was, it seems, kept for more than three hours in that uncomfortable fix before he durst venture down—"when he made tracks," as the Yankees say, "for hum pretty considerably ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... world outside his bean-field. Business, politics, institutions, governments, wars and rumors of wars, were not so much to him as the humming of a mosquito in his hut at Walden: "I am as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... him upstairs. The band had stopped, and there was the distant hum of voices and the crackle of plates. Waiters were coming and going from the dining-room, and the butler stood at the door giving instructions. At one moment there was a glimpse within of ladies in gorgeous dresses, and a table laden with silver and bright with fairy-lamps. ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... seat, but on his legs! The favourable grace, the air of courteous attention, which is always shown to a new member when he first speaks, was extended also to Melmotte. There was an excitement in the thing which made gentlemen willing to listen, and a consequent hum, ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... disappear beneath hangings of silk and festoons of flowers; the wealthy display their dazzling luxury, the poor drape themselves proudly in their rags. Everything is light, harmony, and perfume; the sound is like the hum of an immense hive, interrupted by a thousandfold outcry of joy impossible to describe. The bells repeat their sonorous sequences in every key; the arcades echo afar with the triumphal marches of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... result. In a deep, careless stroke, his paddle struck a submerged log and the slender blade snapped short off with a loud crack, the ticklish canoe careened suddenly to one side, then righted again with a sullen splash. At the sound the silent point quickly stirred with life. There was the hum of excited voices and a blinding flash of flame lit up the darkness, followed by the sharp crack of rifles and the hum of bullets,—they ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... their bridge, took its stability for granted. Children of an emotional race, it sufficed to discover that they loved the cool green freshness of England, the careless kindly freedom of her life and ways; the hum of her restless, smoky, all-embracing London; her miles and miles of books and pictures. Above everything they loved Oxford, where all were brothers in spirit—with a proper sense of difference between the brothers of one's own college and the mere outsider:—Oxford, at this particular hour of ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... portable voicewrite to a comfortable position in front of the view wall and began composing another of the series of letters that had begun months ago in time and parsecs away in space. His voice was a fluid counterpoint to the soft hum of ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... directed to the maintenance of friendly relations and the preservation of peace and quiet on the frontier. All this is now changed. There is no such thing as the Indian frontier. Civilization, with the busy hum of industry and the influences of Christianity, surrounds these people at every point. None of the tribes are outside of the bounds of organized government and society, except that the Territorial system has not been extended over that portion of the country known as the Indian Territory. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... the Groenfontein Legislative Council. A hum of assent followed on her utterance, and an English girl got up upon a form. She was the niece of a High Commissioner, daughter of a Secretary of Imperial Government, at Cape Town, who wrote ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... limer leurs fers de manire qu'ils ne parussent pas tre coups, et que le moindre effort sufft cependant pour les rompre. D'ailleurs, ils les faisaient si bien rsonner, qu' les entendre on et dit qu'ils en portaient un double poids. Aprs avoir hum l'air quelque temps, ils se prirent tous par la main et se mirent danser pendant que Tamango entonnait le chant guerrier de sa famille[1], qu'il chantait autrefois avant d'aller au combat. Quand la danse ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... sustained attention. This attention originated in idleness for which I have a natural talent. One evening I wandered into a cafe, in a town not of the tropics but of the South of France. It was filled with tobacco smoke, the hum of voices, the rattling of dominoes and the sounds of strident music. The orchestra was rather smaller than the one that performed at Schomberg's hotel, had the air more of a family party than of an enlisted band, and, I must confess, ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... The sun shone down upon the fields covered with yellow grain. Far in the distance carriage-wheels softly slipped along the road. There was a torpor in the air—not a bird's cry, not an insect's hum. Gorju cut himself a switch and ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... No lily-muffled hum of summer-bee But finds some coupling with the spinning stars; No pebble at your foot but proves a sphere: . . . . . Earth's crammed with Heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... very much" replied Helen the tears gathering in her pretty eyes as she spoke. But she soon wiped them away and leaning back in the comfortable hansom she commenced to hum a little tune as she arranged her ruffled hair at the little looking glass. Little did she dream how very soon she would have to ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... us from a high hill, where the different portions of the battle were fought, and where they caught Napoleon Bonaparte, and where Blucher came up and made things hum in the German language, and then he took us off to his farm where the most of the relics were found, and began to sell things to dad, until he had filled the hind end of the wagon with bullets and grape-shot, sabres and bayonets, old rusty rifles, ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... and blues of the field flowers. It was warm, a spring day, with none of the discomfort of summer heat. Jubilant, Roger spun around in circles, inhaling the fragrance of the field, listening to the hum of insect life stirring back to awareness after a season of inactivity. Then he was running and tumbling, barefoot, his shirt open, feeling the soft grass give way underfoot and the soil was good ...
— Pleasant Journey • Richard F. Thieme
... had passed into a room where Masters, Joe Rix, and the Pedlar sat cheek by jowl in close conference with a hum of deep voice. But at her appearance ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... augmenting his restlessness, came occasional snatches of music mingled with the hum of voices. The hours passed on while he tossed nervously on his bed. Then the music stopped. Laughter and farewells floated up to him. In a few minutes all was silence save for the footfalls of ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... fashioned," said the other, "than thou didst in the Bishop's rochets—they were black and white, thou art blue and brown. Sleeping dogs every one of you, lying down, loving to slumber—shepherds that starve the flock but will not watch it, each looking to his own gain—hum." ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... the basement Theo noticed a change in the appearance of the factory. On every floor they passed there was a hum of machinery and a glimpse of endless rows of china dishes; they stood on shelves; they covered tables; they were stacked one within another ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... been more sudden and complete if, from a gaily lighted modern street, full of hum and bustle, they had fallen down an oubliette into a dark, deserted fairyland. Just outside was the imported life of Paris, but this old town was Turkish, Arab, Moorish, Jewish and Spanish; and in Algeria old ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... delighted. I hope that in five years' time you will be supporting me and my family. Your sister-in-law will be speechless with jealousy. I congratulate you. Hum—The Blank and Dash Avenues Company? Well, you won't have to send John very far with your copies of the pleadings. Pope was appointed attorney for the company last week, in place of old Slyther, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... stand before you tonight to report that the state of our union is strong. Now, America is working again. The promise of our future is limitless. But we cannot realize that promise if we allow the hum of our prosperity to lull us into complacency. How we fare as a nation far into the 21st century depends upon what we ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... faint crimson tinged Eliza's cheeks, her lips were firmly compressed, and her eyes were dim and lustreless. From time to time, while waiting on the guests, she cast an anxious, searching glance through the windows over the market-place, and seemed to listen to the hum of voices, which often became as deafening as the wild roar of the storm, ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... the great one, who held the invisible keys of relief, who penetrated this mystery of human maladjustment. It was a busy, toiling, active, subdued place, where the tinkle of the telephone bell, the hum of electric annunciators, as one member of the staff signalled to another, vibrated in the tense atmosphere. Into this hive poured the suffering, mounting from the street, load after load, in the swiftly flying cages; their visit made, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... could hear the sound of Tim Curtin's fiddle, and the hum of voices coming from the interior of the building. Our fear was that any of the inmates of the neighbouring dens might be awake, and, catching sight of us, might give the alarm, and allow the men time to escape. As far as I had learned, however, the door we were now watching and Mother ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... hot-tempered gentleman went slowly out of the room without answering; passing his hands through his hair, and saying, "Ah! Hum!" and nodding with ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... quite new, and the inside quite unsoiled. British manufactured brass, too, in the buckle. Shouldn't have expected that in a Persian-made article. Inscription scratched on with the point of a knife or some other implement not employed in metal engraving. May I trouble you for a pin? Thank you. Hum-m-m! Thought so. Some dirty, clayey stuff rubbed in to make the letters appear old and of long standing. Look here, Mr. Narkom; metal quite bright underneath when you pick the stuff out. Inscription very recently added; leather, American tanned; brass, Birmingham; ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... our chocolate from the Magdalena, Night announced herself,—Night, a jealous, dark lady, eclipsed and made invisible all her rivals, that she might solely possess us. Night's whispers lulled us. The rippling river, the rustling leaves, the hum of insects grew more audible; and these are gentle sounds that prove wide quietude in Nature, and tell man that the burr and buzz in his day-laboring brain have ceased, and he had better be breathing deep ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... however, I have spent—let me see-pearls one forty thousand; emeralds, seven fifty; rubies, eight forty; brilliants, nine twenty; onyxes—I have several very nice onyxes-two thirty. Other gems, carbuncles, agates—hum! Yes, it figures out at just over four million seven hundred and forty thousand. I dare say that we may say five millions, for I have ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Hum! That is what I have come to talk to you about, sir. You have got to get married, and at once. Why, when I was your age, sir, I had been an inconsolable widower for three months, and was already paying my addresses to your admirable mother. Damme, sir, it is your duty to get married. You can't ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... one would bend forward and whisper to his neighbour, who answered with a grunt or a motion of his head; but for the most part, and for mile after mile, we all sat silent, listening only to the horses' gallop, the chime of the swingle-bars, the hum of the night wind in our ears. The motion and the strong breeze together lulled me little by little into a doze. My neighbour on the right wore around his shoulders a woollen shawl, against which after a while I found ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... make a top hum, and at marbles, you bet, I'm the cock of the walk and the king of the "set;" I'm hearty and healthy—and don't you forget The dead loads of "goodies" that I can destroy— I'm a frolicsome, rollicksome, ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... "Ha! hum!" commented the farmer. "No end of scrapes because you're a lively lad and can't help it. See here, Wildwood, do you know what I would do if I were in ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... ringing for evening prayer, with the hum of voices from the shore, mingled not inharmoniously with the ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... not the first to climb the ill-lighted stair that wound up to the Fursts' dwelling. The entry-door on the fourth storey stood open, and a hum of voices came from the sitting-room. The circular hat-stand in the passage was crowded ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... cars. The young man reported all well and returned to the caboose. The train crew was playing poker for small stakes. Garrison had joined them. For a time Dave watched, then read a four-day-old newspaper through to the last advertisement. The hum of the wheels made him drowsy. He stretched out comfortably on the seat with his coat ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... open window, endeavoured in every way to force the shutter open, but without success. There was no slit through which a knife could be passed to raise the bar. Then with his lens he tested the hinges, but they were of solid iron, built firmly into the massive masonry. "Hum!" said he, scratching his chin in some perplexity, "my theory certainly presents some difficulties. No one could pass these shutters if they were bolted. Well, we shall see if the inside throws ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... a breeze of sufficient strength sweeps across it. The larks are so multitudinous that no distinct song can be caught, and amidst the confused melody comes the note of the thrush and the blackbird. A constant under-running accompaniment is just audible in the hum of innumerable insects and the sharp buzz of flies darting past the ear. Only those who live in the open air and watch the fields and sea from hour to hour and day to day know what they are and what they mean. ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
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