"Spindle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rottenness and putrefaction, so he, by his grease, is preserved from love. Pleased with his pipe, he sits and smokes in his elbow-chair; totally unknown to him is the ardent passion that actuates the sentimental soul: alas! unhappy man! he never indulged in the pleasing reverie which inspires the spindle-shanked lover, as he strays through nodding forest by gliding stream; if he marries, he chooses a companion fat as himself; they lie together, and most musical is their snore, they melt like two pounds of butter in one plate in ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... sometimes done on the old high wheel, which was whirled around by hand and then allowed to come to rest while another section of the cotton, wool, or flax was drawn from the carded mass by hand, then whirled again, twisting this thread and winding it up on the spindle, and so on. Or it was done by the low wheel, which was kept whirling continuously by the use of a treadle worked by the foot, while the material was being drawn out all the time by the two hands, and twisted and wound continuously by the horseshoe-shaped device known as the "flyer." When the thread ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... cotton is spun by placing it in a hollow cylinder of palm bark attached to a bamboo stick (tibtibean). A bit of thread is twisted from the cotton at the bottom of the cylinder, and is attached to a spindle, which is rubbed rapidly against the naked thigh, and is then allowed to turn in shallow basket, or on a piece of hide. As it spins it twists out new thread and the arm of the operator rises higher and higher, until at last the spindle stops. The position of the extended arm is then altered, and ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... this sink, connected with the electric wires, we have rigged three hanging spindles, of as many different sizes. These spindles can be raised or lowered by the operator, while they are in motion. Each spindle is armed on every side with loose wings of alternating wire scrapers and dish-cloths. The vessel to be cleansed is placed on the movable carrier at the bottom of the sink. Passing under a spindle of the proper size, the spindle is lowered, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... aforetime, As he carved his hatchet's handle, And my mother taught me likewise, As she turned around her spindle, When upon the floor, an infant, At her knees she saw me tumbling, 40 As a helpless child, milk-bearded, As a babe with mouth all milky. Tales about the Sampo failed not, Nor the magic spells of Louhi. Old at length became the Sampo; Louhi vanished with her magic; Vipunen while singing perished; ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... on her before she knew, but, when she took away some of the figs and saw it, she said, "So here it is," and held out her bare arm to be bitten. Others say that it was kept in a vase, and that she vexed and pricked it with a golden spindle till it seized her arm. But what really took place is known to no one. Since it was also said that she carried poison in a hollow bodkin, about which she wound her hair; yet there was not so much as a spot found, or any symptom of poison upon her body, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... inclined to play the part of the young enthusiast in "Excelsior," as I looked up at the weathercock which surmounts the spire. But the man who oils the weathercock-spindle has to get up to it in some way, and that way is by ladders which reach to within thirty feet of the top, where there is a small door, through which he emerges, to crawl up the remaining distance on the outside. "The situation and appearance," ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... scholastic art and rhetoric the heaven-born power; between the rhetoric of Aristotle that illuminated the solitary student, and the rhetoric of Demosthenes that ran along in rolling thunders to the footstool of Artaxerxes' throne. Oh, these dear spindle-shanked Schoolmen! they were people, respected reader, not to be sneezed at. What signifies ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... It is not true that a mature and unperverted woman is flattered by receiving only the general obsequiousness which most men give to the whole sex. In the man who contradicts and strives with her, she discovers a truer interest, a nobler respect. The empty-headed, spindle-shanked youths who dance admirably, understand something of billiards, much less of horses, and still less of navigation, soon grow inexpressibly wearisome to us; but the men who adopt their social courtesy, never seeking ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... apparatus for the propagation of rotative oscillations is shown to the left of Fig. 3, and consists of a cylinder, A, mounted on a tubular spindle, and which is set into circular oscillations around its axis by the little vibrating membrane, C, which is attached to the axis of the cylinder by a little crank and connecting rod shown in detail in Fig. 4. This membrane is set into vibration by a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... repeated, and pussy was induced to dance after a string dangled before her, to roll over and play in apparent ecstasy with a flake of wool, as if it were a mouse, and Watch joined in the game in full amity. Mother Dolly, busy with her distaff, looked on, not displeased, except when she had to guard her spindle from the kitten's pranks, but she was less happy when the children began ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is the pashiuba barrigudo, or bulging-stemmed palm (Iriartea ventricosa); which, rising on a pyramid of roots for several feet, runs up in a single column for some distance, and then swells in a curious spindle-form, again to assume the same proportions as below, till its head spreads out in several fan-like branches with web-shaped leaflets. The tree looks as if supported on stilts, and a person can stand upright among the roots of old trees with the perpendicular stem above his ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... If she abuses her husband, she receives one hundred stripes; but abuse from him is not a punishable offense. Instruction, at home as well as at school, is confined to boys. The birth of a boy is indicated by hanging a bow and arrow over the door; that of a girl, by a spindle and yarn. In naming the number of his children, the father counts only the boys. Boys are clothed in the finest material the family can afford; girls, in rags. Parents may destroy their children, but only girls are ever sacrificed. The mother can seldom read and write, her chief duty ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... as any feather He rolled its dainty wheels, Humming and whirring like a spindle After his ...
— The Nursery, April 1878, Vol. XXIII. No. 4 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... for unhappy maidens neither to give indulgence to love, nor to wash away cares with delicious wine; or to be dispirited out of dread of the lashes of an uncle's tongue. The winged boy of Venus, O Neobule, has deprived you of your spindle and your webs, and the beauty of Hebrus from Lipara of inclination for the labors of industrious Minerva, after he has bathed his anointed shoulders in the waters of the Tiber; a better horseman than Bellerophon himself, neither conquered at boxing, nor by want ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... on the banks of the Merrimack at its confluence with the Concord, is situated the city of Lowell,—the Spindle City, the Manchester of America. The Merrimack, which affords the chief water-power that gives life to the thousand industries of Lowell, takes its rise among the White Mountains, in New Hampshire, its source being in the Notch of the Franconia Range, at the base of Mount Lafayette. ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... must be added the twirling-stick and fireboard (Fig. 76). Make these of spruce. The twirling-stick, spindle, or fire-drill should be a little over half an inch in diameter and sixteen inches long. Its sides may be rounded or bevelled in six or seven flat spaces like a lead-pencil, as shown in Fig. 76. Cut the top end to a blunt point and sharpen the bottom ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... mouth, his gills were longer and more feathery, the curves of his tail were more shapely, but still he was, as yet, the merest apology for a tadpole, and so he remained until his limbs grew. They came in front at first—froggy's come behind, he wants them to swim with—the most curious spindle-shanks of arms that can be imagined, with elbows always flexed, and fingers always stretched apart. In due course his legs followed, of like purpose and absurdity. For swimming he only used his tail, but for ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... the table, just as I used to," Rose said, and together they worked, Rose bringing the rosebud china, while Aunt Judith brought the pale green plates, and cups and saucers from the little china closet, and placed them upon the dainty, spindle-legged table. There were tiny, fresh rolls, chocolate with cream, a dish of raspberry jam of which Rose was very fond, and even the little round pound cakes that Rose so well remembered. Aunt Judith had sent ...
— Princess Polly At Play • Amy Brooks
... was furnished with a sober grandeur, in perfect tone with its architecture. Everything was solid and ponderous, save here and there, where in some lady's bower there appeared the spindle-legged tables and inlaid cabinets of the Chippendale period, which had an air of newness where all else was so old. The upper rooms were low and somewhat dark, the heavily mullioned windows being ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... game than that," he said, his articulation very thick; "but it takes nerve—if you've got it, you spindle-legged little cockney!" ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... wood wandered the much-confused knight, recognizing, step by step, the path of the night before. The turf hut was before him—the door was open—and in the doorway sat the maiden herself, spinning, the distaff by her side, the spindle dancing on the ground, and the pilgrim's hat no longer hiding her beauteous brow and wealth of dark braided hair. But, intolerable sight, seven or eight of last night's loungers were dispersed hither and thither ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was a strong, leaping flame, and all the room shone out in its light; the ancient Turkey carpet, with its soft blending of every colour into a harmonious no-colour; the quaint portraits, like court-cards in tarnished gilt frames; the teak-wood chairs and sofas, with their delicate spindle-legs, and backs inlaid with sandalwood; Miss Phoebe's work-table, with its bag of faded crimson damask, and Miss Phoebe herself, pleasant to look upon in her dove-coloured cashmere gown, with her kerchief ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... to turn the spindle, and the field-mouse hired four spiders, who were to weave day and night. Every evening the mole visited her, and was continually speaking of the time when the summer would be over. Then he would keep his wedding-day with Tiny; but now the heat ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... Berget says: "The inventor, the incontestable forerunner of aviation, was an Englishman, Sir George Cayley, and it was in 1809 that he described his project in detail in Nicholson's Journal.... His idea embodied 'everything'—the wings forming an oblique sail, the empennage, the spindle forms to diminish resistance, the screw-propeller, the 'explosion' motor,... he even described a means of securing automatic stability. Is not all that marvellous, and does it not constitute a complete specification for ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... crowd of people a woman rushed, and falling on the ground, she seized the master's knees. She still held a spindle in her hand. She was covered with rags; her face was thin and her eyes deeply sunken, for during fourteen years ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... mill-made wash-stand, with its pitcher and bowl of blinding red and green china, the straw-framed lithographs of symbolic female figures against the multi-coloured, new wall-paper; the inadequate spindle chairs of white and gold; the sphere of tissue paper hanging from the gas fixture, and the plumes of pampas grass tacked to the wall at artistic angles, and overhanging two astonishing oil paintings, in dazzling ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... trees laden with pale fruit entangled with pomegranates—green spheres and ruddy amid burnished leaves. By the roadside too were many berries of bright hues; the glowing red of haws and hips, the amber of the pyracanthus, the rose tints of the spindle-wood. These make autumn even lovelier than spring. And then there was a wood of chestnuts carpeted with pale pink ling, a place to dream of in the twilight. But the main motive of this landscape ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... counsellors, guardians, or servants—for we know not whether she lead or be led, be venerated or supervised. When the spot has been reached that she, or her urgent advisers, may regard as favourable, she arches her back, bends forward, and introduces the extremity of her long spindle-shaped abdomen into one of the cells; the-little eager heads of her escort meanwhile forming a passionate circle around her, watching her with their enormous black eyes, supporting her, caressing her wings, and waving their feverish antennae as though ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... a regular spindle-shanks. And just look at that fool Akoulna. Wasn't the girl a regular untidy slattern, and just look at her now! Where has it all come from? Yes, he has fitted her out. She's grown so smart, so puffed ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... seem faintly to suggest Wagnerian Donner und Blitzen, but in general Mr. Foote has resisted the universal tendency to copy the mannerisms so many take to be the real essence of the Bayreuthian. A pretty bit of fancy is the use of a spinning-wheel accompaniment to the love-song, although the spindle is nowhere suggested by the poem. Indeed, the spinning is treated as a characteristic motif for the Norseman's bride, somewhat as it is Senta's ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... the short and slender limbs, which served for its support. And yet, as if all this wretched deformity were not enough, one leg was shorter than the other, and the foot was a club one. To assist him in walking, he carried a pair of crutches, apparently much too long for him, which raised his spindle arms in their loose sockets, and rendered the hump more horrible. When he moved, his crutches spread out on either side of him, as he swung along between them, taking up a vast deal of room without any apparent necessity. ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... crowd, and now slowly working towards the cross, was a banner on a high-raised cross-pole, a picture of a man and woman half-clad in skins of beasts seen against a background of green trees, the man holding a spade and the woman a distaff and spindle rudely done enough, but yet with a certain spirit and much meaning; and underneath this symbol of the early world and man's first contest with nature were the ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... of your singularitie, theyr blind narrowe eyes cannot pearce into the profunditie of hypocrisie, you alone with Palamed, can pry into Vlysses madde counterfeting, you can discerne Achilles from a chamber maide, though he be deckt with his spindle and distaffe: as Ioue dining with Licaon could not be beguiled with humane flesh drest like meate, so no humane braine may goe beyond you, none beguile you, you gull all, all feare you, loue you, stoupe to you. Therefore, good sir, be rulde by mee, stoupe your fortune so ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... before his wife expected him. Supper was not ready, and in her haste to rise to prepare it, she overturned the wheel when it was still in motion. Hargreaves, entering at that moment, noticed that the spindle, usually horizontal, was now revolving in an upright position. This gave him the idea, and a short time afterwards he invented a machine with which one person could spin several threads at once (at first eight). From it has been developed ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... inserted on corolla tube; 1 pistil with 2 stigmas. Stem: 1 to 3 ft. high, usually branched, leafy. Leaves: Opposite, upper ones acute at tip, broadening to heart-shaped base, seated on stem. Fruit: A spindle-shaped, 2-valved capsule, containing ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... all Hesperia, fed The turning spindle with the twisting thread; The woof, the shuttle follow'd her command, Till various garments grew beneath her hand. And now, while all her thoughts with Capac rove Thro former scenes of innocence and love, In distant fight his fancied dangers share, Or wait him glorious from the finish'd war; ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... of bomb which has proved to be the most successful is pear-shaped. The tail spindle is given an arrow-head shape, the vanes being utilised to steady the downward flight of the missile. In falling the bomb spins round, the rotating speed increasing as the projectile gathers velocity. The vanes act as a guide, keeping the projectile ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... one of the old-fashioned two-handed swords, it was possible to comprehend, that from that germ would expand the brains that would by and by construct a steel ship or bridge; when the first rude spindle was fashioned, all the commencement necessary to create and work the world's looms ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... long stone seat beneath the eaves Of his old cottage, as it chanced that day, Employ'd in winter's work. Upon the stone His Wife sate near him, teasing matted wool, While, from the twin cards tooth'd with glittering wire, He fed the spindle of his youngest child, Who turn'd her large round wheel in the open air With back and forward steps. Towards the field In which the parish chapel stood alone, Girt round with a bare ring of mossy wall, While half an hour went by, the Priest had sent Many a long look ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... restricted to no class, and we have a Burns as well as a Chaucer, a Keats as well as a Gower, yet I am glad that the result of my studies tends to prove that it is but an unfounded assumption. By the Spear-side his family was at least respectable, and by the Spindle-side his pedigree can be traced straight back to Guy of Warwick and the good King Alfred. There is something in fallen fortune that lends a subtler romance to the consciousness of a noble ancestry, and we may ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... of the same height and in bone structure not greatly unlike. I had figured that daily tramping after game should have taken a few folds of superfluous flesh off my frame, and so, no doubt, it had done. Yet I had pulled the spindle around the face of the dial to a point which recorded for me a total of sixteen pounds and odd ounces more than his penny had ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... On the beech-trees were still just enough of coppery leaves to look like fires lighted high-up to air the eeriness; but most of the twigs, pearled with water, were patterned very naked against universal grey. Berries were few, except the pink spindle one, so far the most beautiful, of which there were more than Earth generally vouchsafes. There was no sound in the deep lanes, none of that sweet, overhead sighing of yesterday at the same hour, but there was a quality of silence—a dumb mist murmuration. We passed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... a plant whose seed is much more beautiful than its flower. By the way, I have two, for the Spindle Tree is in seed, which has a quite insignificant blossom. But the plant I mean is a wild peony, which I dug up in a brake on the slopes of Helikon. It is a single white whose flower lasts, perhaps, three days. It makes a large seed-pod, which burst ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... was a small terrace bordered on the right and left by spindle-trees planted in boxes, which were connected by a paling. Behind the shrubs, sitting on a bank but stooping forward so that they could see Dalbreque through the branches, ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... And the host were all wearied and Night came on them, Night that puts to rest the works of men, and lulled all the earth to sleep; but to the maid no sleep brought rest, but in her bosom her heart was wrung with anguish. Even as when a toiling woman turns her spindle through the night, and round her moan her orphan children, for she is a widow, and down her cheeks fall the tears, as she bethinks her how dreary a lot hath seized her; so Medea's cheeks were wet; and her heart within her was in ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... wool thus prepared, when twisted by the spindle, and made into a firm thread, is called the warp, and the art which regulates these operations the art of ...
— Statesman • Plato
... loose habit of most Arachnida, crabs, and other articulates. It was also proposed to secure several spiders in the above manner upon the periphery of a wheel, the revolution of which would give a twist to their conjoined threads, carried through a common eyelet upon the spindle; but this can be accomplished without the inconvenience of whirling the spiders out of sight, by modifications of the apparatus which has always been used for twisting ordinary silk. It will probably be inferred from the above, that, in securing the spider, two points are to be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... Velocity.—Twisting the fibres of wool by the fingers would be a most tedious operation; in the common spinning-wheel the velocity of the foot is moderate; but, by a very simple contrivance, that of the thread is most rapid. A piece of cat-gut passing round a large wheel, and then round a small spindle, effects this change. The small balls of sewing cotton, so cheap and so beautifully wound, are formed by a machine on the same principle, and but a few steps more complicated. The common smoke-jack is an instrument in which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... it. Be pious, and God-fearing, and industrious, remembering what the Holy Scripture says (Prov. xxxi.): 'A virtuous woman takes wool and flax, and labours diligently with her hands. She stretches out her hands to the wheel, and her fingers grasp the spindle.' Hadst thou learned this, in place of thy costly broidery, methinks it would have been better with thee ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... foreign king." "Perish! and may not then mine eye alone Draw out the venom drop, and yet remain Enough? the portion cannot be perceived." Away she hastened with it to her home, And, sprinkling thrice flesh sulphur o'er the hearth, Took up a spindle with malignant smile, And pointed to a woof, nor spake a word; 'Twas a dark purple, and its dye was dread. Plunged in a lonely house, to her unknown, Now Dalica first trembled: o'er the roof Wandered her haggard eyes—'twas ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... private room," said Fernand, eager to get the fighter out of view of the rest of the little crowd. He drew Ronicky and Jerry Smith into a little apartment which opened off the hall. It was furnished with an almost feminine delicacy of style, with wide-seated, spindle-legged Louis XV. chairs and a couch covered with rich brocade. The desk was a work of Boulle. A small tapestry of the Gobelins made a ragged glow of color on the wall. Frederic Fernand had recreated an atmosphere two ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... see him owre his trash, As feckles as wither'd rash, His spindle shank, a guid whip-lash; His nieve a nit; Thro' blody flood or field ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... classes which have least been altered by education, which have shared least in progress. But the student of folklore soon finds that these unprogressive classes retain many of the beliefs and ways of savages, just as the Hebridean people use spindle-whorls of stone, and bake clay pots without the aid of the wheel, like modern South Sea Islanders, or like their own prehistoric ancestors. {11a} The student of folklore is thus led to examine the usages, myths, and ideas of savages, which ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... his way into the asteroid at a good rate. Every few moments he pushed another circle or spindle of thorium out of the hole. Rip directed some of the men to carry them away, to the other side of the asteroid. He didn't want chunks of thorium ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... contains the flowers is also put to many uses. It is of a long spindle shape, of fibrous, cloth-like texture, and brown colour. The Indians use it as cloth. It makes an excellent bag, in which the native carries his paints or other articles; and a large one, stretched out, makes a very comfortable cap. Indeed, Guapo used the first spathe he laid his hands ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... in readiness for work, can be worked by inexperienced workmen. The bed plate has T slots, to receive a parallel vise, which can be fixed at any angle for angular cutting. The articulated lever carries a saw of 10 in. or 12 in. diameter, on the spindle of which a bronze pinion is fixed, gearing with the worm shown. The latter derives motion from a pair of bevel wheels, which are in turn actuated from the pulley shown in the engraving. The lever and the saw connected with it can be raised and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... baby comes to a home, legend says, three beautiful young girls come to take care of the baby all through its life, but no one ever sees these young girls. Each one has a strange work to do. One, called Clotho, carries a spindle on which is wound flax. The second, named Lachesis, twists a thread from the spindle, called the thread of life. And Atropos, the third, has a pair of shears ready to ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant
... the gloom. Candle and fiddle in hand, Jinnie mounted them and halted before the unopened door. Somehow it seemed as if she would find before the grate the long, thin body of her dead father, and she distinctly remembered the spindle fire-flames falling in golden yellow licks upon his face. In her imagination she could again see the flake-like ashes, thrown out from the smoldering fire, rise grey to the ceiling, then descend silently over him like a ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... the syrup is of the same density as the juice of the grape when the fruit and the juice are placed together in the can. The density of the syrup and the juice are, of course, to be obtained by the use of the spindle, the same arrangement employed for determining when the percentage of sugar in the grape juice is right for raisin-making or for wine-making. Whatever the density of the juice, make the syrup the same by the use of ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... to the invention of the machinery named below, all carding, spinning, and weaving of wool and cotton had been done by the use of the hand-cards, one-spindle wheels, and common hand-looms. The work, for a long period, was performed in families; but the improved machinery propelled by steam power, has so reduced the cost of cotton manufactures, that all household manufacturing has long since been abandoned, and the monopoly yielded to capitalists, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... had turned to the west in its majestic course and Tharon, the noon work over, drew up the spindle-legged stool and sat down to play to herself and Anita. The old woman, half Mexic, half Indian, drowsed in a low chair by the eastern window, her toil-hard hands clasped in her lap, a black reboso over her head, though the day was warm as summer. A kitten frisked in the ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... Hallowed, and huntress holy as whom I serve, Here in your sight and eyeshot of these men Stand, girt as they toward hunting, and my shafts Drawn; wherefore all ye stand up on my side, If I be pure and all ye righteous gods, Lest one revile me, a woman, yet no wife, That bear a spear for spindle, and this bow strung For a web woven; and with pure lips salute Heaven, and the face of all the gods, and dawn Filling with maiden flames and maiden flowers The starless fold o' the stars, and making sweet The warm wan heights of the ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... ushered Madelon was accounted the grandest sitting-room in the village. When Burr's father had built his fine new house he had made the furnishings correspond. He had eschewed the spindle-legged tables and fiddle-backed chairs of the former generations, and taken to solid masses of red mahogany, which were impressive to the village folk. The carpet was a tapestry of great crimson roses with the like of which no other floor in town was covered, and, moreover, there was a glossy black ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... in the heat of summer, and brightened here and there in autumn by the rich orange-coloured fruit of the arum, the scarlet berries of the white bryony, and—deeper in the woods—by the pinky-waxen berries of the spindle-tree, described by Lord Tennyson as "the fruit which in our winter ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... nothing to cover me now, poor creature that I am!' cried the young woman, and transformed herself first into a distaff, then into a wooden beetle, then into a spindle, and into all imaginable shapes. But all these shapes the King's son went on destroying till she stood before ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... or five feet wide, may be called so—Caper saw at the doors of the houses, standing chatting to each other, many old women, their white hair flying in every direction, who, as they talked, knitted stockings; or, with distaff in hand, twirled the spindle, making flax into thread for spinning, or wool into woof and web for weaving. Hearing a shuttle, he looked in at an open door, and found a young girl busily weaving a heavy blue cloth at a queer old loom; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the evening from her labor in the fields, carrying a fat, heavy baby, a clumsy hoe not much lighter than the youngster, and an earthenware water-pitcher, and, at the same time, industriously spinning wool with a small hand-spindle. And yet some people argue about the impossibility of doing two things at once. Whether these poor women have been hoeing potatoes, carrying the infant, and spinning wool at the same time all day I am unable to say, not having been an eye-witness, though I really should not be much astonished ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... muscles are frequently filled with fat, which gives roundness and beauty to the limbs. The muscles are of various forms; some are longitudinal, each extremity terminating in a tendon, which gives them a fusiform or spindle-shaped appearance; others are either fan-shaped, flat, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... thoughts for business, while the prayers rattle out by the hundred at home. Only imagine the pious fervor of one of these priests in a first-class Lowell mill, of say a hundred thousand spindles. Print a large edition of some good prayer and paste a copy on each spindle, and the place would seem to him the very gate of a Buddhist heaven. He would feel sure of taking heaven by storm, with a sustained fire of one hundred thousand prayers every second. His first requisite for a prosperous ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... consist of four parts, the shoulder jaw and the screw jaw, made of maple, and the end spindle and the middle spindle, made of hickory. The parts when broken can be bought separately. Handscrews vary in size from those with jaws four inches long to those with jaws twenty-two inches long. The best kind are oiled so that glue will not adhere ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... should be courteous, facile, sweet, Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride: I meant each softest virtue there should meet, Fit in that softer bosom to reside. Only a learned and a manly soul I purposed her, that should, with even powers, The rock, the spindle, and the shears, control, Of Destiny, and spin her own free hours. Such when I meant to feign, and wished to see, My Muse bade, BEDFORD ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... poor lad; and he was only on his way to see after his own, or his wife's, since all the Whitburn sons are at an end, and the Tower gone to the spindle side. They say, too, that the damsel he wedded perforce was given to magic, and fled in form of a hare. But be that as it will, young Copeland—St. Bede, pardon me! What ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Watt made the real beginning of the application of steam to industry by patenting his steam engine; in 1760 Wedgwood established the pottery industry in England; in 1767 Hargreaves devised the spinning-jenny, which banished the spindle and distaff and the old spinning-wheel; in 1769 Arkwright evolved his spinning-frame; and in 1785 Cartwright completed the process by inventing the power loom for weaving. In 1784 a great improvement in the smelting of iron ores (puddling) was worked out. These inventions, all English, were revolutionary ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... accidents next day, and went straight to the carpenter, bullied him again, and after bearing it for awhile Chips's adze would become so blunt that he was obliged to go off to the grindstone, where he would stop for a couple of hours, a good deal of which time was spent in oiling the spindle ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... are comical. This one whom the file brings up has bottle-shaped shoulders. Although extremely narrow-chested and spindle-shanked, he is big-bellied. He is too much for Barque. "Hullo, ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... were at work as usual, and Nora's hand was pausing on her spindle, and her eyes were fixed upon the narrow path leading through the Forest ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... one of the secretaries to the Japanese Legation, very small and yellow, with prominent cheek-bones and long, slanting, bloodshot eyes over which the lids blinked incessantly. His body was disproportionately large for his spindle legs, and he turned his toes in as he walked. The skirts of his coat were too wide, there was a multitude of wrinkles in his trousers, his necktie bore visible evidence of an unpractised hand. It was as if a daimio had been taken out of one of those cuirasses ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... her in all that is good. When the girl was fifteen years old, the old woman became ill, called the child to her bedside, and said, "Dear daughter, I feel my end drawing near. I leave thee the little house, which will protect thee from wind and weather, and my spindle, shuttle, and needle, with which thou canst earn thy bread." Then she laid her hands on the girl's head, blessed her, and said, "Only preserve the love of God in thy heart, and all will go well with thee." Thereupon she closed her eyes, and when she was laid in the earth, the maiden followed the ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... skimming the sand to the east of Hull, but you will hardly care for these if you have Neptune aboard. His spirit will bid you jibe your sail to that freshening west wind off Allerton and bowl down the coast parallel with the long stretch of Nantasket sands. Again at the spindle on Harding's Ledge you may catch cunners; perhaps a stray cod. A cod! There you speak a magic word to the fisherman from the tide flats far inland. There is the golden fleece for which the Argonauts of the land-locked harbor set their prows to the eastward in the starlight. ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... Nature. Its botanical title reveals its special character—Rhizaphora. Very diverse indeed are the means by which plants are distributed. While some are borne, some fly and others float. The mangrove is maritime. While still pendant from the pear-shaped fruit of the parent tree, the seed, a spindle-shaped radicle, varying in length from a foot to 4 feet, germinates—ready to form a plant immediately upon arrival at a suitable locality. A sharp spike at the apex represents the embryo leaves ready to unfold, while the roots spring from the opposite ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... girls of her own age was a certain excellently named Minnie Smellie, who was anything but a general favorite. She was a ferret-eyed, blond-haired, spindle-legged little creature whose mind was a cross between that of a parrot and a sheep. She was suspected of copying answers from other girls' slates, although she had never been caught in the act. Rebecca and Emma Jane always knew when she had brought a tart or a triangle of layer ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the men are occupied in these pursuits, the women are very diligent in manufacturing cotton cloth. They prepare the cotton for spinning, by laying it in small quantities at a time, upon a smooth stone, or piece of wood, and rolling the seeds out with a thick iron spindle; and they spin it with the distaff. The thread is not fine, but well twisted, and makes a very durable cloth. A woman, with common diligence, will spin from six to nine garments of this cloth in one year; which, according to its fineness, will sell for a minkalli ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... much weight to carry; but it seemed to Mr. Porson that his utter freedom from thought about himself had a large share in his immunity from weariness. He continued slight and thin—which was natural, for he was growing fast; but the muscles of his little bird-like legs seemed of steel. The spindle-shanks went striding, striding without a check, along the roughest roads, the pale face shining atop of them like a sweet calm moon. To Mr. Person's eyes, the moon, stooping, as she sometimes seems to do, downward from the sky, always looked like him. The ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... confused; To praise her beauty, scarcely was excused; No flatt'ry pleasure gave, and she'd reply: Good sister stay!—consider, we must die; Each feature perishes:—'tis naught but clay; And soon will worms upon our bodies prey: Superior needle-work our fair could do; The spindle turn at ease:—embroider too; Minerva's skill, or Clotho's, could impart; In tapestry she'd gained Arachne's art; And other talents, too, the daughter showed; Her sense, wealth, beauty, soon were spread abroad: But most her wealth a marked attention drew; The belle had ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... basket-hilt; beside it hung a dirk—longer than usual, and fine in form, with a carved hilt in the shape of an eagle's head and neck, and its sheath, whose leather was dry and flaky with age, heavily mounted in silver. Below these was a card-table of marquetry with spindle-legs, and on it a work-box of ivory, inlaid with silver and ebony. In the corner stood a harp, an Erard, golden and gracious, not a string of it broken. In the middle of the room was a small square table, covered ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... Where first the Soldan fought, and him defied, Two mighty blows she gave the Turk untrue, One cleft his shield, the other pierced his side; The prince the damsel by her habit knew, "See, see this mankind strumpet, see," he cried, "This shameless whore, for thee fit weapons were Thy neeld and spindle, not ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... unmistakable, but how different, in the realistic group of the "Thunderstricken,"—the long, lank youth, with spindle-shanks and egg-shaped body, bounding forward, with most grotesque strides, over the uncouth heap of dead bodies, ungainly masses with soles and nostrils uppermost, lying in beast-like confusion. This youth, with something of a harlequin in his jumps ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... maidens of my own countree. The maidens of Franconia I ever love to meet, They dwell in fond remembrance A vision ever sweet. Of maids they are the crown and pearl! And if I might but spin them I would make the spindle whirl!" ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... field, and | buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planeth a vineyard. | She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms. | She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth | not out by night. She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her | hands hold the distaff. She stretcheth out her hand to the | poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. She is | not afraid of the snow for her household; for all her household ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... had hard work to clothe him, and felt the insult keenly. He went into the school-house, choked his anger down, and tried to forget all about it by drawing a picture of the master. It was an excellent likeness,—his spindle legs, great feet, short pants, loose coat, sunken eyes, hooked nose, thin face, and ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... arabesques. Two or three small rugs relieved the bareness of the floor. An oval table on very thin legs stood in the middle; the chairs and couch seemed to have been made to match it, and had an eminently bare and uncomfortable appearance; a vase of flowers stood on a spindle-legged little table in front of one of the windows which opened down to the ground. Some colored prints in frames of stained wood hung on the walls, and some skimpy ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... The ceremony was begun by sacrificing a sheep to Juno, the fleece being spread upon two chairs on which the bride and bridegroom sat: then a prayer was said over them. The young wife, carrying a distaff and spindle filled with wool, was conducted to her house, a cake, baked by the vestal virgins, being carried before her. The threshold of the house was disenchanted by charms, and by annointing it with certain unctuous perfumes; ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... to be so bitter that it is not eaten by birds (Loudon, "Arboretum," ii., 497, 1.); and, secondly, because it is a pretty coincidence that this most familiar of household birds should feed fondly from the tree which gives the housewife her spindle,—the proper name of the dogwood in English, French, and German being alike "Spindle-tree." It feeds, however, with us, certainly, most on worms and insects. I am not sure how far the following account of its mode of dressing its ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... the cord of a man's existence, you will generally find the blackest hank in it twined by a woman's hand, but it is not less common to trace the golden thread to the same spindle. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... streets like crooked lanes, where old women, who all through the summer months, Sundays excepted, give their feet an air-bath, may be seen sitting on the doorsteps clutching with one bony hand the distaff and drowsily turning the spindle with the other. ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... there are three areas of the throwing-stick: Australia, where it is simply an elongated spindle with a hook at the end; the country of the Conibos and the Purus, on the Upper Amazon, where the implement resembles that of the Australians, and the hyperborean ...
— Throwing-sticks in the National Museum • Otis T. Mason
... going?" asked Jeanne, at ten o'clock, putting on her gloves, while Carlino, who had given Noemi an end of his interminable muffler to hold, the other being fastened behind his neck, revolved like a spindle on its axis, until his neck was bigger in circumference than his head. "And am I really to be the priest ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... the slave of human ingenuity, as is the fate of so many a wild, free mountain torrent. While all things else are compelled to subserve some useful purpose, it idles its sluggish life away in lazy liberty, without turning a solitary spindle or affording even water- power enough to grind the corn that grows upon its banks. The torpor of its movement allows it nowhere a bright, pebbly shore, nor so much as a narrow strip of glistening sand, in any part of its course. It slumbers between broad ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... notice that in the early representations of Athena, while she is very warlike in her bearing and raises her lance in her right hand, she also carries in her left the distaff and the spindle and the lamp of knowledge. In the later art of Phidias she is still stern and severe, but her face also expresses dignity and grandeur of thought and character. Later still, her warlike attributes are made less prominent: the shield rests on the ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... spindle of a woollen wheel, being taken very strangely out of an house at Salem Village, was used by a spectre as an instrument of torture to a sufferer, not being discernible to the standers-by, until it was, by the said sufferer, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Evening we had much rain, with some very heavy Claps of Thunder, one of which carried away a Dutch Indiaman's Main Mast by the Deck, and split it, the Maintopmast and Topgallantmast all to shivers. She had had an Iron Spindle at the Maintopgallant Mast head which had first attracted the Lightning. The ship lay about 2 Cable lengths from us, and we were struck with the Thunder at the same time, and in all probability we should have shared ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... monarch, too, King Cotton, and hedged him with a divinity surpassing that of earthly potentates. To doubt his royalty and power was a confession of ignorance or cowardice. This potent spirit, at the nod of our Prosperos, the cotton-planters, would arrest every loom and spindle in New England, destroy her wealth, and reduce her population to beggary. The power of Old England, the growth of eight hundred years, was to wither as the prophet's gourd unless she obeyed its behests. And a right "tricksy spirit" it proved indeed. There was a complete ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... enough, however, to contain him, as he lay curled up, sucking his thumb, and hugging to his breast the soft fragment of a sea-bird's downy breast. If he stirred, his mother's foot was on the rocker, as she sat spinning, but her spindle danced languidly on the floor, as if "feeble was her hand, and silly her thread;" while she listened anxiously, for every sound in the street below. She wore a dark blue dress, with a small lace ruff opening in front, deep cuffs to match, and a white apron likewise edged with lace, ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... funeral pyre; and on the twelfth day, lying there, he returned to life, and he told them what he had seen in the other world. Many wonders he related concerning the dead, for example, with their rewards and punishments: but what had impressed him as most wonderful of all was the great spindle of Necessity, reaching up to Heaven, with the planets revolving around it in graduated whorls of width and spread: yet all concentric and so timed that all complete the full circle punctually together—'The Spindle turns on the knees of Necessity; and on the rim of each ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... into the dry bones of a nomenclature which seems the remotest from them, the most opposed to them. Thus in Danish the male and female lines of descent and inheritance are called respectively the sword-side and the spindle-side. [Footnote: [In the same way the Germans used to employ schwert and kunkel; compare the use of the phrases on etha sperehealfe, and on etha spinlhealfe in King Alfred's will; see Kemble, Codex ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... a moment picture in our mind's eye the stage and person of the European or American conjuror. A few small tables with spindle legs (upon them a steel frame or so, transparent and decorative) are exposed to our view. The performer appears with rolled up sleeves in close fitting clothes and by the end of his performance has filled the stage with several large flags, a bouquet of flowers and, may ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... why that monkey grew hoarse? Yesterday he wanted to equal our Paris in dancing, and danced for us the adventures of Leda, during which he sweated and caught cold. He was as wet and slippery as an eel freshly taken from water. He changed masks one after another, whirled like a spindle, waved his hands like a drunken sailor, till disgust seized me while looking at that great stomach and those slim legs. Paris taught him during two weeks; but imagine to thyself Ahenobarbus as Leda or as the divine swan. That was a swan!—there is no use in denying it. But ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the ship, of cloth of silk that should never rot for no manner of weather. Yet went that lady and made a carpenter to come to the tree which Abel was slain under. Now, said she, carve me out of this tree as much wood as will make me a spindle. Ah madam, said he, this is the tree the which our first mother planted. Do it, said she, or else I shall destroy thee. Anon as he began to work there came out drops of blood; and then would he have left, but she would not suffer him, and so he took away as much ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... later, Mons. MARIUS, who, as the French sporting nobleman, in Family Ties, in love with an English "Mees," and so proud of his English slang, was simply the character to the life, without any more exaggeration than was artistically necessary. On "the Spindle Side," Miss LILY HANBURY looks handsome, and is generally fairly well-suited; Miss PATTIE BROWNE has the most difficult part of the three, and it is not to be wondered at if she a bit out-tommies Tommy. Miss ELLALINE TERRIS looks, acts, and sings ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... sleeves to match. The men wear several very short coats, one over the other, the shortest trimmed with fringe; sometimes sentences are embroidered with coloured woollens round the edge. It was market day; the women were sitting, with distaff and spindle, on each side of the entrance to the Halle. Some of them have short bead-chains with a ring, attached to the left shoulder, to stick their distaffs in when not at work. There was abundance of fruit and vegetables, ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... in her mind a hated rival, was the hardest, the longest, the most destructive of all. It is doubtful whether the retort of the eunuch Narses to the empress Sophia, when she recalled him from his government to ply, as she said, the spindle, that he would spin for her such a thread as in her life she would not disentangle, is authentic, but it undoubtedly presents historic truth. Whether or not Narses called the Lombards into Italy, their king Alboin came from Pannonia over the Carnian ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... be an old woman with a wrinkled face, a furred brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaky voice, a scolding tongue, having a ragged coat on her back, a skull cap on her head, a spindle in her hand, a dog or cat by her side. There are three classes or divisions of devils—black, grey, and white. The first are omnipotent for evil, but powerless for good. The white have power to help, but not to hurt. The grey are efficient for both good and evil.... ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... stood each on a polished altar, and held torches in their hands, to give light all night to the guests. And round the house sat fifty maid servants, some grinding the meal in the mill, some turning the spindle, some weaving at the loom, while their hands twinkled as they passed the shuttle, ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various |
