"Skein" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the fingers. Smaller scraps were put in to welt the seams; and all this went off in great bundles to farmhouses to be sewed by the farmers' wives and daughters for the earning of pin-money. If the gloves were to be the most genteel members of the buckskin race, there was added to the bundle a skein of silk, with which a slender vine was to be worked on the back of the hand. The sewing was done with a needle three-sided at the point, and a stout waxed thread was used. A needle of this sort went in more easily than a round one, but even then it was ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... Toulouse street. Though depleted by the city's present drainage system and most likely poisoned by it as well, its waters still move seaward in a course almost due easterly, and empty into Chef Menteur, one of the watery threads of a tangled skein of "passes" between the lakes and the open Gulf. Three-quarters of a century ago this Bayou Sauvage (or Gentilly—corruption of Chantilly) was a navigable stream of wild ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... undertones with a great observance of secrecy, sometimes stopping Abe on the stairs, sometimes beckoning him to her side when she was busy about her household tasks on the pretense of requiring his assistance. On one occasion she even went so far as to inveigle him into holding a skein of wool about his clumsy hands, while she wound the violet worsted into a ball, and delicately inquired if he believed Samuel spoke the truth when he had protested that he had never paid court to any ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... care heir obey weight bare their prey freight fare there weigh neigh hair where sleigh veins fair stair reign whey chair pear skein rein pair ...
— How to Teach Phonics • Lida M. Williams
... uselessness of the habit. Did a volley of oaths ever start a heavy load? Did curses ever unravel a tangled skein? Did they ever extirpate the meanness of a customer? Did they ever collect a bad debt? Did they ever cure a toothache? Did they ever stop a twinge of the gout? Did they ever save you a dollar, or put you a step forward ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... home, but she was no longer the woman she had been. Her thoughts were like a confused, tangled skein; only one thread, only one thought was clear to her, namely that she must carry the spectre of the sea-shore to the churchyard, and dig a grave for him there; that by so doing she might win back her soul. Many a night she was missed ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... sisters could no longer bear this behaviour, and they plotted together how to get rid of her. Now, one of the windows looked into the garden of an ogre, so they proposed to drive the poor girl away through this; and letting fall from it a skein of thread with which they were working a door-curtain for the queen, they cried, "Alas! alas! we are ruined and shall not be able to finish the work in time, if Violet, who is the smallest and lightest of us, does ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... the Baron. Here is my master's passport, which we used to get the post-horses, and as my master has gone in the direction of Bordeaux with Monsieur the Baron's passport, and as Monsieur the Baron goes toward Geneva with my master's passport, the skein will probably be so tangled that the police, clever as their fingers are, can't ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... and must be dismissed, and his new lawyers, a grasping, incompetent crew. For a moment, indeed, he had had a glimpse of a clear sky. A woman, who seemed to have the same kind of business faculty that many Frenchwomen possess, had laid hands on his skein of troubles, and might have unravelled them. But she had thrown him over. In a little while he would have to let Mannering—for who would buy an estate in such a pickle?—sell his collections, and go and live ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lacked now to set in worse snarl my already tangled skein of evil fortune! Out of all the thousand ways in which we several actors in this human comedy might have gone without crossing each other's paths, why should Fate have chosen the only one to ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... | unu jardo? | pohr oo'noo yahr'doh? This will do | Tio cxi tauxgos | tee'oh chee tahw'gohss I will take this | Mi tion prenos | mee tee'ohn preh'nohss A reel of cotton | Unu bobeno da kotono | oonoo bo-beh'no dah | | ko-toh'no A skein | Fadenaro | fahdeh-nah'ro A packet of mixed | Paketo da miksitaj | pahkeh'toh dah pins | pingloj | miksee'tahy peen'gloy Not so fine | Ne tiel delikata | neh tee'ehl | | dehleekah'tah Show me some | Montru ...
— Esperanto Self-Taught with Phonetic Pronunciation • William W. Mann
... unravel the tangled skein of cause and circumstance which surrounds the subject of the world-sweeping pandemic which masquerades under the misleading title of the "Spanish Influenza," the first and most important initial step must be a keen and careful sifting of the facts and forces, natural ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... and get their legs over the traces, and are dragged up against the rocks; carriage, horses, harness, all a confused heap. The Brave, and I, and the postilion, were constantly at work, in extricating the whole concern from a tangle, like a skein of thread. We broke two thick iron chains, and crushed the box of a wheel, as it was; and the carriage is now undergoing repair, under the window, on the margin of the lake: where a woman in short petticoats, a stomacher, and two immensely long tails ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... into a fair-sized drawing-room, whose tasteful and well-arranged furniture at once prepossessed him. An open piano, a sheet of music carelessly left on the stool, a novel lying face downwards on the table beside a skein of silk, and the distant rustle of a vanished skirt through an inner door, gave a suggestion of refined domesticity to the room that touched the fancy of the homeless and nomadic Bly. He was still enjoying, in half embarrassment, that vague and indescribable ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... together with remarkable persistence, and in fact refuse to be identified with any tribes but those of Asia Minor and the AEgean. In them we see the broken remnants of the old Minoan (Keftian) power, driven hither and thither across the seas by intestinal feuds, and "winding the skein of grievous wars till every man of them perished," as Homer says of the heroes after the siege of Troy. These were in fact the wanderings of the heroes, the period of Sturm und Drang which succeeded the great civilized epoch of Minos and his thalassocracy, of Knossos, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... and sat down on the floor before an easy-chair, through a rent in the old covering of which the hair was escaping, and drawing from her pocket a needle and a skein of worsted, she set to work to mend it. For three days past she had been waiting for an hour's time to do this piece of mending, which ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... Try we life-long, we can never Straighten out life's tangled skein, Why should we, in vain endeavour, Guess and ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... prepared the way, and that when thou didst go by chance to her, she was ready for thee. But if this is all she knows, it goes not far. Still it may help—it may help. In a tangled web, no one may say which will be the thread which patiently followed may unravel the skein." ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... sense of colour, a picture on which various colours are painted is placed before the patient, as well as a skein of wool of the same shade as one of the colours in the picture, which he is ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... from her funnels in a twisted skein. What had once been ore in many a mine, and trees in many a forest, had become an individual, as what has been vegetables and fruits and the flesh of animals becomes at last a child with a soul, a ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... romantic street-scenery. It has the great votive temple of the Superga, which stands on a high hilltop above the city, gazing across at Monte Rosa and lifting its own fine dome against the sky with no contemptible art. But when you have seen the Superga from the quay beside the Po, a skein of a few yellow threads in August, despite its frequent habit of rising high and running wild, and said to yourself that in architecture position is half the battle, you have nothing left to visit but the Museum of pictures. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... "The picture made me think of the very thing. I had been fumbling with a tangled skein, trying to find a place to begin unwinding. Now you have given me the starting thread, and it all begins to smooth out beautifully. I'm going for pencil and paper now, to write it all down before ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... That canst each property detect Of mood or grain, that canst untwist Each tangled skein of intellect, And with thy scalpel eyes lay bare 40 Each mental nerve more fine than air,— O brain exact, that in thy scales Canst weigh the sun and never err, For once thy patient science fails, One problem still defies thy art;— Thou never canst compute for her The distance ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... it, it had seemed remote, all too white, a "Symphonie en Blanc Majeur"—as Theophile Gautier would have called it—besides devoid of human interest. But Arthur had interwoven a human strand of melody, a scarlet skein of emotion, primal withal, yet an attempt to catch the under emotions of the ice-bound Esquimaux surprised in their zone of silence by the sleep of the Shadow, the long night of their dreary winter. And the composer had succeeded surprisingly ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... neighbourhood she must trot alone or else not at all. Usage soon rendered this perfectly natural to herself. Her father, who had had other experiences, did not much like the idea of a Swancourt, whose pedigree could be as distinctly traced as a thread in a skein of silk, scampering over the hills like a farmer's daughter, even though he could habitually neglect her. But what with his not being able to afford her a regular attendant, and his inveterate habit of letting anything be to save himself trouble, the ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... the brink of the wide grass terrace just below their observer's parapet, they paused a moment and faced each other in closer speech. This interchange of words, though brief in measure of time, lasted long enough to add a vivid strand to Mrs. Ansell's thickening skein; then, on a gesture of the lady's, and without signs of formal leave-taking, the young man struck into a path which regained the entrance avenue, while his companion, quickening her pace, crossed the grass terrace and mounted ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... days his brain was a swarm of paradoxes, subtleties and hair-splittings, a skein of rules as complicated as the articles of the codes that involved the sense of everything, indulged in puns and ended in a most tenuous and singular celestial jurisprudence. The abstract side vanished, in its turn, and under the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... is hidden from us by a band of clouds, that stretches, right above our head, from one end of the sky to the other, like a long skein of white wool. It is alone in the blue void, and seems to make more peaceful, and even a little mysterious, the wonderful light of the fields we traverse—these fields intoxicated with life and vibrant with the music of birds; while, by contrast, the distant ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... it. But knowin' I'd clung to Duty's apron strings I felt like leavin' the event. And when Miss Meechim come in I wuz settin' calm and serene in a big chair windin' some clouded blue and white yarn, Aronette holdin' the skein. I'd brung along a lot of woollen yarn to knit Josiah some socks on the way, to make me feel ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... four shades of scarlet, four ditto of crimson, four ditto of amber, four ditto of peach, three ditto of stone-colours, three ditto of blue, three ditto of blue greens, three ditto of yellow greens, and one skein of white embroidery silk or of ...
— The Lady's Album of Fancy Work for 1850 • Unknown
... skein val'id kir'tle pol'i cy slain sal'ad tur'tle leg'a cy crane mal'let fer'tile cur'ti lage sword val'et myr'tle syn'a gogue boast breez'y wid'geon cod'i cil ghost greasy pig'eon dom'i cile queer gar'den mal'ice ver'sa tile brief par'don pal'ace hyp'o crite spoke e'vil tor'toise hip'po drome ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... splendid threads whose naturally ardent brightness was doubled in the sunshine. When the pretty lady's-maid pulled a comb of ivory into the midst of the undulating and golden waves of that enormously magnificent skein of silk, one might have said that a thousand sparks of fire darted forth and coruscated away from it in all directions. The sunshine, too, reflected not less golden and fiery rays from numerous clusters of spiral ringlets, which, divided upon Adrienne's forehead, fell over her cheeks, and in ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... washed in a solution of potash, and then with water, and after drying dipped them in the acids. The acid mixture used consisted of 3 parts by weight of sulphuric to 1 part of nitric acid, and were prepared some time before use. The cotton was dipped one skein at a time, stirred for a few minutes, pressed out, steeped, and excess of acid removed by washing with water, then with dilute potash, and finally with water. Von Lenk's process was used in England at Faversham ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... Eastbound departed slowly into that distance whence I had come. I stared after it as it went its way to the far shores of civilization. It grew small in the unending gulf of space, until all sign of its presence was gone save a faint skein of smoke against the evening sky. And now my lost trunk came back into my thoughts, and Medicine Bow seemed a lonely spot. A sort of ship had left me marooned in a foreign ocean; the Pullman was comfortably steaming ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... to Clarissa—as pleasant as anything could be which involved deception; there was always the sting of that fact. Miss Granger was rarely absent for ten minutes together on these occasions; it was only some lucky chance which took her from the room to fetch some Berlin wool, or a forgotten skein of floss silk for the perennial spaniels, and afforded the brother and sister an opportunity for a few hurried words. The model villagers almost faded out of Miss Granger's mind in this agreeable society. She found herself listening to talk about things ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... now to confess to myself that I loved Luella Knapp. And she? I hoped and feared, and ran over in my mind every incident of my later visits that might tell in what regard I was held—the tones, the words, the manner, that ran from deep interest to indifference. And trying to untangle the skein, I was a good deal startled to feel a touch on my arm as I reached ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... "how unfortunate! What ought I to do? Should I be forgiven, do you think, if I were to go and hold that skein of wool for the old ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... cut into short threads, never more than half the length of the skein. If a long needleful is used, it is not only apt to pull the work, but is very wasteful, as the end of it is liable to become frayed or knotted before it is nearly worked up. If it is necessary to use ...
— Handbook of Embroidery • L. Higgin
... the time,' he says, in winding up that knotted skein of prophecy, which he leaves for Merlin to disentangle, for 'he lives before his time,' as he takes that opportunity ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... they seemed to pierce the sky, That was an awful deep of empty blue, Save that the wind was in it, and on high A wavering skein of wild-fowl tracked it through. He marked them not, but went with movement slow, Because his thoughts were sad, his ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... sound. Mrs. Reynolds and Cora were busily preparing breakfast, and their housewifely movements about the kitchen below gave the boy a singular pleasure. The smell of meat in the pan rose to his nostrils, and the cooing laughter of the baby added a final strand in a homely skein of noises. No household so homelike and secure had opened to him since he said good-by to his ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... This was an establishment at the foot of the hill, where it hung out its sign, in company with several others of the same character, which professed to supply all the wants of the community. Here everything was to be had from a gallon of molasses to a skein of thread, or a quintal of codfish, to a pound of nails. On one side, as you entered, were ranges of shelves, protected by a counter, on which were exposed rolls of flannels of divers colors, and calico ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... a thick mop of fine, bright hair, rebellious like herself, of the sort that goes with an ardent personality, waved and curled over her little poll, and generally ended the day in a tangle only less intricate than can be achieved by a skein of silk. Of her small oval face, people were accustomed to say it was all eyes, an unoriginal summarising, but one that forced itself inevitably upon those who met Christian's eyes, clear and shining, of the pale brown that the sun knows how to waken in a shallow pool in a hill-stream, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the fallen skein Of some tired spider, looped and blown, As fragile as a strand of rain, Across the air, and upward thrown By breaths of hayfields newly mown— So glimmering it is and fine, I doubt ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... the ear is perforated and distended to a loop some two inches in length, in which a brass ring is worn. Just above this loop a small hole through the shell is usually made, and from this a small skein of beads depends. Similar ear ornaments are worn by Kenyahs and some of the Klemantans, but not by Muruts, and by few individuals only among Punans and Sea Dayaks. Many of the latter wear a row of small brass rings inserted round the margin of ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... at table everybody suddenly stood up, my mother and myself reverently with the rest, when the whole company drank my health, and I collapsed down into my chair as red and as limp as a skein of scarlet wool, and my mother with some confusion expressed my obligation and her own surprise at the compliment. I talked a good deal to Captain Shelley, who is a nice lad, and, considering his beauty, and the admiration bestowed on him by all the fine ladies ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... human heart drifted in and out of McLean's hearing; fragments of home talk, tendernesses, economies, intimate first names, and dinner hours, and whether it was joy or sadness, it was in common; the world seemed knit in a single skein of home ties. Two or three came by whose purses must have been slender, and whose purchases were humble and chosen after much nice adjustment; and when one plain man dropped a word about both ends meeting, and the woman with him laid a hand on his arm, saying that his children ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... herself in wonderment and in thoughts which, in her woman's brain, were tangled like a skein of thread. ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... by that beautiful girl, with her delicate features, her wealth of raven hair, above all, with the soft, sad, dreamy eyes, that look so loving, so trustful, and so good. In such characters as theirs these things are soon accomplished. A walk or two, a waltz, a skein of silk to wind, a drive in a pony-carriage, an afternoon church, and behold them in the memorable summer-house, where he won her heart—completely and unreservedly, while flinging down his own! Then came all the sweet excitement, all the fascinating mystery of mutual ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... drawing-room in her riding-habit, after a hunting breakfast, from which Robert had absented himself, preferring a cup of tea in my lady's boudoir; "but this year I don't know what has come to you. You are good for nothing but to hold a skein of silk or read Tennyson to ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... this they began supper, which was already laid on a side-table. Ere they had finished there was a jerk in the fire-smoke, the rising skein of which bulged out into the room, as if some giant had laid his hand on the chimney-top for a moment. It had been caused by the opening of the outer door. A heavy step was now heard in the ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... home, alas! did foes more deadly wait Than Saladin's fierce crew. The lamp of love Was changed for one of hate, which threw Its false and fatal skein of light above. A shuddering shock, a fearful crash, foretold the ...
— Rowena & Harold - A Romance in Rhyme of an Olden Time, of Hastyngs and Normanhurst • Wm. Stephen Pryer
... which had woven this smooth and finished texture out of the ravelled skein was naturally the first impression that I felt, on handing the manuscript back to Ezra Jennings. He modestly interrupted the first few words in which my sense of surprise expressed itself, by asking me if the conclusion which he had ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... made any progress in unravelling his skein of perplexities he saw Janie coming across the lawn. She took the chair her father had left and seemed to take her father's mood with it; the same oppressive silence settled on her. Neeld broke ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... a white background in a good light. Select, as a test color, a skein of light green color, such as would be obtained by mixing a pure green with white. Ask the examinee to select and pick out from the heap all those skeins which appear to him to be of the same color, whether of lighter or darker shades. A color-blind person will select amongst others some ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... wandering from its orbit—no variation in its seasons—and yet imagine that the Arch-ordainer will hold back the tides He has sent from their unseen source, at our miserable bidding? Shall we think that our prayers can avert a doom woven with the skein of events? To change a particle of our fate, might change the destiny of millions! Shall the link forsake the chain, and yet the chain be unbroken? Away, then, with our vague repinings, and our blind demands. All must walk onward ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Altogether the skein was too tangled for us to attempt to unravel it. They had seen vessels evidently, both sailing ships and steamers, but whether it was yesterday, or ten years back, there were no means of ascertaining; ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... community the people must decide for themselves. However near to the appearances such an impression might be, nothing could be further from the facts. If I have helped the reader to unravel the tangled skein of our national life, if I have sufficiently revealed the mind of the new movement to show that there is in it 'a scheme of things entire,' it should be quite clear that the deliberate intentions both of Mr. Gerald Balfour and of those Irishmen whom he took into ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... disengaging the two monstrous misconceptions from the tangled skein of inherited beliefs and framing them in words, I have already repeatedly performed. Let us keep the results in mind. Here they are in their nakedness: (1) Human beings—men, women, and children—are animals (and so they are natural): (2) human beings are neither natural nor supernatural, ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... a big lump in her throat. She had not meant to rebel openly, but she had lost her temper, and the words had flashed out. Beatrice's threat alarmed her. Through all the tangled skein of Gwen's character there ran, like a thread of pure gold, the intense passionate love for her father, and the desire to preserve his good opinion. She could not bear to see the grieved look that came into his eyes when he was ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... he was unaware. The effort became hopeless when the biography in 1889 published papers which upset all that Henry Adams had taken for diplomatic education; yet he sat down once more, when past sixty years old, to see whether he could unravel the skein. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Rhodes for wishing to present the Boer side of the case. It would, indeed, have been wiser on the part of Mr. Hofmeyr and other Bond leaders to have forgotten the past and given a friendly hand to the one man capable of unravelling the tangled skein of affairs. ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... empty jar had a string of beads tied around its neck, and inside it was placed a switch, care being taken that a portion of it hung outside. Beside the jar was a basket containing five bundles of unthreshed rice, on which was a skein of thread supporting a new jar. All this was covered with a woman's skirt. Finally a bound pig was laid just ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... lands, And slowly, thread by thread, Draw forth the folded strands, Than which the trembling line, By whose frail help yon startled spider fled Down the tall spear-grass from his swinging bed, Is scarce more fine; And as the tangled skein Unravels in my hands, Betwixt me and the noonday light, A veil seems lifted, and for miles and miles The landscape broadens on my sight, As, in the little boll, there lurked a spell Like that which, in the ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... gone to Dashwood and Solomon to make himself personally acquainted with that string in the tangled skein which he was determined to unravel; and now, with his mind at rest upon that subject, he was returning to settle matters with Ling Chu, that Chinese assistant of his who was now as deeply under suspicion as any suspect in ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... childhood candy appealed to me more than anything else, as never having had a surfeit of sweets, candy to me was a rare treat. I remember, Mary, when a little child, my thrifty mother, wishing to encourage me to learn to knit my own stockings, she, when winding the skein of German yarn into a ball, occasionally wound a penny in with the yarn. I was allowed to spend the penny only after I had knitted the yarn and the penny had fallen from the ball. What untold wealth that ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... assembly) kunsido. Situation situacio, sido. Situation (post) oficio. Six ses. Sixteen dek-ses. Sixty sesdek. Size grandeco. Size (of a book) formato. Size glueto. Skate gliti. Skates glitiloj. Skein fadenaro. Skeleton skeleto. Sketch skizi. Sketch skizo. Skewer trapikileto. Skid malakcelo. Skiff boateto. Skilful lerta. Skill lerteco. Skilled lerta. Skim sensxauxmigi. Skimmer sxauxmkulero. Skin hauxto. Skin (animal) felo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... of the story bears a certain similarity to that of Mysterier, Vicioria, and Pan, being a love affair of mazy windings, a tangled skein of loves-me-loves-me-not. But it is pure comedy throughout. Rolandsen, the telegraph operator in love with Elsie Mack, is no poet; he has not even any pretensions to education or social standing. He is a cheerful, riotous "blade," who sports with the girls ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... knots or lays were of forty threads, and twenty lays made a skein or slipping. The number varied, however, with locality. To spin two skeins of linen thread was a good day's work; for it a spinner was paid eight cents a day and ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... while he gathered his far-strayed wits. Now and then he weakly attempted to catch the other's eye, but as Mike studiously refused to be caught, Cassidy could only blink owlishly and fumble again with the tangled ends of the skein. Finally, abandoning it all as useless, he turned toward the door, yet arrested his dazed shambling to ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... sympathise with virtue is a vulgar trick that any common fellow can do; but it is not everybody who can take a scoundrel, and cause us to weep and whimper over him as though he were a very saint. Give a young lady of five years old a skein of silk and a brace of netting-needles, and she will in a short time turn you out a decent silk purse—anybody can; but try her with a sow's ear, and see whether she can make a silk purse out of THAT. That is the work for your real great artist; and pleasant it is to see how many ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sat on a rug, with a scrap of buckskin in one hand and an awl in the other. This was the beginning of my practical observation lessons in the art of beadwork. From a skein of finely twisted threads of silvery sinews my mother pulled out a single one. With an awl she pierced the buckskin, and skillfully threaded it with the white sinew. Picking up the tiny beads one by one, she strung them with the ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... made out of a hank of loose separate strands between 4 and 5 feet long, tied together with string or bark cloth at two opposite points, so as to form a belt of between 2 feet and 2 feet 6 inches in length. For better description I would liken it to a skein of wool, as it looks when held on the hands of one person for the purpose of being wound off into a ball by someone else, but which, instead of being wound off, is tied up at the two points where it passes ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... meant, except in cases where the text itself is corrupt. But it may sometimes be doubted whether Michael Angelo could himself have done more than indicate the general drift of his thought, or have disengaged his own conception from the tangled skein of elliptical and ungrammatical sentences in which he has enveloped it. The form of Campanella's poetry, though often grotesque, is always clear. Michael Angelo has left too many of his compositions in the same state as his marbles—unfinished ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... ails thee?" said Cleopatra, smiling her slow smile. "Has the golden skein of stars got tangled, my astronomer? or dost thou plan some new feat of magic? Say what is it that thou dost so poorly grace our feast? Nay, now, did I not know, having made inquiry, that things so low as we poor women ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... pleasures. As a matter of fact it had struck me on the train that this was about the first time Craig Kennedy had ever been called in upon a case even remotely connected with the picture field. I knew he would be confronted with a tangled skein of idle talk, from everybody, about everybody, and mostly without justification. I hoped he would not fall into the popular error of assuming all film players bad, all studios schools of immorality. I was glad I was able to ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... Kansas. But the American kept thinking about it; and he wanted the Kansans to think about it, too. When he was about to meet Sir John Jellicoe he envisaged the tall column in Trafalgar Square, surmounted by the one-armed figure turned toward the wireless skein on ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... table in his room in Paris, with its piled sheets of ruled paper, and he felt he wanted nothing in the world except to work. It would not matter what happened to him if he could only have time to weave into designs the tangled skein of music that seethed through him as the ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... should have been the first, as it was the most urgent, task. But it was complicated, adjourned, and finally botched by interweaving it with a mutilated scheme for the complete readjustment of the politico-social forces of the planet. The result was a tangled skein of problems, most of them still unsolved, and some insoluble by governments alone. Out of the confusion of clashing forces towered aloft the two dominant Powers who command the economic resources of the world, and whose democratic institutions and internal ordering ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... boards to be cleaned. Next it travels through a small, round hole something like the eye of a needle so that any knots or rough places can be detected. If the threads are found to be strong and without flaws two to half a dozen of them are put together in a loose skein and they are twisted in a doubling machine. Afterward the thread is polished, cleaned, and run off on spools or bobbins. That is the road Mother's spools of cotton have to travel before they get to her. How seldom we think of this or are grateful ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... and most at hand expedient was a dip in the universal indigo tub, which waited in every "back shed" of the Puritan homestead. One single dip in its black-looking depths and the skein of spun lamb's wool acquired a tint like the blue of the sky. Immersion of a day and night gave an indelible stain of a darker blue, and a week's repose at the bottom of the pot made the wool as dark in tint as the indigo itself. For variety in her blues, the enterprising ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... in a way of thought which has led me high and low these many years and still invites me. The day was near its end when we got to the first big clearing. From the top of a high hill we could see above the far forest, the red rim of the setting sun, big with winding from the skein of day, that was now flying off the ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... she has a wide mouth; and but for wanting ten or a dozen teeth and grinders she might compare and compete with the comeliest. Of her lips I say nothing, for they are so fine and thin that, if lips might be reeled, one might make a skein of them; but being of a different colour from ordinary lips they are wonderful, for they are mottled, blue, green, and purple—let my lord the governor pardon me for painting so minutely the charms of her who some time ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... again; and the more she read it, the more was she confused by the mixture of the first and third person; the substitution of the 'i' for the 'T. I.;' and the transition from the 'I. T.' to the 'You.' The writing looked like a skein of thread in a tangle, and the note was ingeniously folded into a perfect square, with the direction squeezed up into the right-hand corner, as if it were ashamed of itself. The back of the epistle ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... arrogance! Thou liest, thou thread, Thou thimble, Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail! Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket thou! Brav'd in mine own house with a skein of thread! Away! thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant, Or I shall so be-mete thee with thy yard As thou shalt think on prating whilst thou liv'st! I tell thee, I, that thou ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... scarcely possible. It had been brought to Kaiachououk's notice, and he had lost no time in seeking out the man and taxing him with his remissness. A mixture of traits like the colours in a variegated skein of worsted formed the spectrum of Kalleligak's character; and selfishness, which fortunately is rarer among the Eskimos than among those in keener competition with civilization, was too often the prevailing colour. ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... has that close flattening against the ground which distinguishes a dead man from a sleeper. He is a dinner-fatigue man, with a chaplet of loaves threaded over a belt, and a bunch of his comrades' water-bottles slung on his shoulder by a skein of straps. It must have been only last night that the fragment of a shell caught him in the back. No doubt we are the first to find him, this unknown soldier secretly dead. Perhaps he will be scattered before others find him, so we look for his identity ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... spake Odysseus of many counsels: "Atreus' son, what word hath passed the door of thy lips? Man of mischief, sure thou shouldst lead some other inglorious army, not be king among us, to whom Zeus hath given it, from youth even unto age, to wind the skein of grievous wars, till every man of us perish. Art thou indeed so eager to leave the wide-wayed city of the Trojans, the city for which we endure with sorrow so many evils? Be silent, lest some other of the Achaians hear this word, that no man should so much as suffer to pass ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... skein; of course the thread Got tangled, snarled and twisted; "Have Patience!" cried the artless maid, To him who ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... plain Hannah unrolled one heavy skein, threaded it through their own hoop, and lowered the two ends into the garden, where John stood at attention ready to throw them over the wall. Darsie and Lavender dropped their ends straight into the street, and then chased madly downstairs ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... situation between the child and his mother. He had been obliged to go into town the day after Eleanor's first unfortunate encounter with her hostess, and had hurried home in fear and trembling to try to smooth out any tangles in the skein of their relationship that might have resulted from a day in each other's vicinity. After hurrying over the house and through the grounds in search of her he finally discovered the child companionably currying a damp and afflicted Pekinese in his mother's ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... or too tired, or too lazy for chat or exertion, and such moments are the moments of the Pretty Preacher. The first week of the holidays is especially her own. There is a physical pleasure in doing, thinking, saying nothing. The highest reach of human effort consists in disentangling a skein of silk for her, or turning over Dore's hideous sketches for the Idyls. At such a moment there is a freshness as of cool waters in the accents of the Pretty Preacher. She does not plunge into the deepest themes at once. She leads her listener gently ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... imperceptibly that I don't think I shall mind much. She is the sort of woman who knows how to rule well. In fact, I rather like it, for she winds one round her finger as softly and prettily as a skein of silk, and makes you feel as if she was doing you a ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... know who had been allowed to pass the guards and enter that room. The honest warrior was dismayed to find such a thing could have happened, and although he was unable to read the lettering, he turned the missive over and over in his hand as if he expected close scrutiny to unravel the skein. He then departed and questioned the guards closely, but was assured that no one had entered ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... then an artistic feat, not unworthy of a queen. Isabella instituted trials of needlework amongst her ladies. In the days of her disgrace and solitude, Catherine turned to her embroidery for solace and occupation. She came forth to meet the Cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio with a skein of red silk round her neck.[603] Taylor, the water ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... laughed the little lady. "Come here my Gonerilla, and hold my skein for me. Signor Graziano is going to charm us with one ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... though indeed their origin and starting point may be seen without such water as well as with it. But their ramifications, when under running water, cling and unite—just like flat or hemp carded for spinning—all into a skein, in a way which makes it impossible to trace in which muscles or by what ramification the nerves are distributed among those ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... there side by side, and elbow by elbow, he made a cast of his spear, and it went through the three women, that they were like a skein of thread drawn together on the spear. And that is the way he made an end of the strange, unknown three. And that place got the name of the Valley of the Shapes ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... in a whisper: "There our cuckoo clock used to hang, and there our father's discharge from the army. And there the hanks of yarn that mother spun used to hang—she could spin even better than Black Marianne—Black Marianne has said so herself. She always got a skein more out of a pound than anybody else, and it was always so even—not a knot in it. And do you see that ring up there on the ceiling? It was beautiful to see her twisting the threads there. If I had been old enough to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... aeroplane with a phantom pilot, will replace the Gothic machinery of ruined abbeys and wandering lights. The possibilities of terror are manifold, and it is impracticable here to do more than pick up a few threads in the tangled skein. Terror becomes inextricably interwoven with other motives according to the bent of the author. It is allied with psychology in James' sinister Turn of the Screw, with scientific phantasy in Wells' Invisible Man. It may enhance ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... having gone, he spoke at Jacob: "Perished you are now, Shacob. You have unraveled the tangled skein of eternal life. Pray I do you will find rest with the restless of big London. Annie and Jane fach, sorrowful you are; wet are your tears. Go you and drink a nice cup of tea in the cafe. Most eloquent I shall be in a minute and ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... good-bye without more ado, and I set off for the castle, troubled for my unreadiness in woman nature, the most puzzling, calling, captivating skein in all the universe, because it holds, behind the silken veil of its treasure-house, the eternal mystery of creation, that something divine which is nearest ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... down quietude and darkness on heart and eye. None move, none speak, none sigh But from the laurels comes a leaping voice Crying in tones that seem not man's nor boy's, But only joy's, And hard behind a loud tumultuous crying, A tangled skein of noise, And the girls see their lovers come, each vying Against the next in glad and confident poise, Or softly moving To the side of the chosen with gentle words and loving Gifts for her pleasure of ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various |
