"Hurdy-gurdy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the music supplies, From his hurdy-gurdy the waltz is sublime; His fair daughter Rosa, whose tambourine flies, Is merrily thumping the rollicking time; The Widow McCann pats the tune with her slipper, The peanut-man hums as he peers from his stall, And ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... "I might think poorlier of you than I've a right to if I did. When a rose is held lower in the scale of natur' than a turnip, or the mastership in music is gi'en in again the fiddle in favor o' the hurdy-gurdy, I'll begin to think as you and me is better specimens of natur's handiwork than this here gracious bit o' sweetness as is coming towards us at this minute. Good-evenin', Mr. Eld. Good-evenin', Isaiah. ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... wealth; he went further, and fell into much disbelief of poor men's needs. For instance, he looked upon a man's inability to find employment, or upon a poor fellow's run of bad luck, as upon the placarded woes of a hurdy-gurdy beggar. ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... rationalistic philosophies that moves empiricists to their gesture of rejection. The case of Herbert Spencer's system is much to the point here. Rationalists feel his fearful array of insufficiencies. His dry schoolmaster temperament, the hurdy-gurdy monotony of him, his preference for cheap makeshifts in argument, his lack of education even in mechanical principles, and in general the vagueness of all his fundamental ideas, his whole system wooden, as if knocked together out of ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... books are scattered about in cases in different parts of a double sitting-room, where the cats carouse on one side, and the hurdy-gurdy man girds up his loins on the other. A friend of Boethius had a library lined with slabs of ivory and pale green marble. I like to think of that when I am jealous of Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson, as the peasant thinks of the ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... two later, as Gordon was passing through one of the streets in the lower part of the village, he came upon a hurdy-gurdy playing a livelier tune than most of them usually gave. A crowd of children had gathered in the street. Among them was a little barelegged girl who, inspired by the music, was dancing and keeping perfect time as she tripped back and forth, pirouetted and swayed ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... "grossiere"... and there she stood in her black hat and black cotton gloves.... Hurriedly putting on her hat and long lace scarf she decided that she would not change her shoes. Somewhere out in the sunshine a hurdy-gurdy piped out the air of "Dass du mich liebst das wusst ich." She glanced at the frosted barred window through which the dim light came into the dressing-room. The piping notes, out of tune, wrongly emphasised, slurring one into the other, followed her across the dark basement hall and ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... not at all terrible are the loud phrases about the traffic in women's flesh, about the white slaves, about prostitution being a corroding fester of large cities, and so on, and so on... an old hurdy-gurdy of which all have tired! No, horrible are the everyday, accustomed trifles; these business-like, daily, commercial reckonings; this thousand-year-old science of amatory practice; this prosaic usage, determined by the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... early in costume the following morning. I question if my own mother could have known me, had she lived long enough to see the whiskers sprout on my cheeks, and to contemplate my countenance as a man. I went into Dunning's library, drew the little hurdy-gurdy from its hiding-place, slung it, and began to play St. Patrick's Day in the Morning, with spirit, and, I trust I may add, with execution. I was in the height of the air, when the door opened, and Barney thrust his high-cheeked-bone face into the room, his mouth as wide ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... Piccadilly and the Strand. With a band of young Canadians on pass, I assisted once in giving Nelson's Monument in Trafalgar Square the "once over" with a monocle in my left eye. A few hours later this same crowd commandeered a dago's hurdy-gurdy, and it was sure funny to see three Canadian Highlanders turning this hand organ in ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... found himself, indeed, listening, found himself almost disappointed to hear nothing but the far-off, eternal roar of the city, and the melancholy grinding of a hurdy-gurdy below. Always she carried him away by her intense earnestness, the bewitching softness of her voice, even when it was galleons full of treasure that she saw, with blood-red sails, coming up the river, full of treasure for them. To-night her voice had more than its share of inspiration, ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim |
