"Treadmill" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and gone and the city had struck its highest note of winter activity. Those envied mortals who compose society, pausing for a brief moment of air and relaxation in the holidays, plunged again into the arduous treadmill of the daily round, urged by the flying lash of unrest, creatures of a common fate, plodding wearily up the path of preferment, not daring to falter or to rest under the pain ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... acted according to her own directions. He likewise annulled her will, and in a short time ruined all her friends and acquaintance; not even sparing those to whom, on her death-bed, she had recommended the care of her funeral, but condemning one of them, a man of equestrian rank, to the treadmill. [352] ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... a veneer and that his freer self still lived, but in confinement. At least he felt the great lack in his life, which had been given too much to the piling up of things, to the sustaining of position—getting and spending. Yet he could see no end. He was caught in the rich man's treadmill, only less horrible than that of the poor man with its cold ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... Maggie and her weakling calf. I could feel how all those details sank into her soul, for I had not forgotten how they had sunk into mine when I came fresh from ploughing forever and forever between green aisles of corn, where, as in a treadmill, one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving a shadow of change. The clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of their linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of the instruments, the patches of yellow light on the smooth, ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... tidings, but he finally recovered. I was walking seven and eight miles a day, and doing extra work before and after school hours, and my health began to fail. Those were years I do not like to look back upon—years in which life had degenerated into a treadmill whose monotony was broken only by the grim messages from the front. My sister Mary married and went to Big Rapids to live. I had no time to dream my dream, but the star of my one purpose still glowed ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... machinery, endless stitching, gripping a locomotive lever, pushing the plow, tending the stock, doing the chores, tiresome examination papers; and all the rest of the endless, endless, doing, day by day, of the commonplace treadmill things, that must be done, that fill out the day of the great majority of human lives. This one whom we are following unseen is doing quietly, cheerily his daily round, with a bit of sunshine in his face, a light in his eye, and lightness in ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... Navajo women was not a chivalrous concession on the part of the men, but proceeded simply from the lack of occasion for the exercise of their selfish propensities. No one would be so foolish as to say that even the most savage Indian would put his squaw into the treadmill merely for the fun of seeing her toil. He makes a drudge of her in order to save himself the trouble of working. Now the Navajos were rich enough to employ slaves; their labor, says Major Backus, was "mostly performed by the poor dependants, both male and female." ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... upon no easier terms than privation and work. But there is a wide difference between a man toiling to gain material comforts for those who are dear to him, or laboring to enlighten and reform his own spirit that he may give good gifts to his generation, and a beast whipped round a treadmill to the din of its own everlasting clatter. It is only work whose end shall, in some faint degree, be intelligible, which is demanded for the child; and with this sort of work we believe that it is very possible to furnish him. But our philanthropies in this direction may not be wrought ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... this humdrum, treadmill life, and believe I'm destined to better things. If I could only get a good position in the army or navy, the world would hear from me. They say money opens every door, and mother must open some good wide ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... I cannot continue, time not sufficing; and the next will just have to be worse. All the good I can express is just this; some day, when style revisits me, they will be excellent matter to rewrite. Of course, my old cure of a change of work would probably answer, but I cannot take it now. The treadmill turns; and, with a kind of desperate cheerfulness, I mount the idle stair. I haven't the least anxiety about the book; unless I die, I shall find the time to make it good; but the Lord deliver me from the thought of the Letters! However, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with regard to intellectual pleasures; the same law operates. We see men who are the flower of their age in intellect, who pass beyond their fellows and tower over them, entering at last upon a fatal treadmill of thought, where they yield to the innate indolence of the soul and begin to delude themselves by the solace of repetition. Then comes the barrenness and lack of vitality,—that unhappy and disappointing state ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... can," he said. "You've been through the treadmill. You know all about it and it doesn't attract you. This infernal chase after excitement—it's like a spreading fever. There's no peace for anyone now-a-days. I want you to stop it. You've got that sort of influence. I sensed it directly I saw you. You've got that priceless possession—a quiet ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... absence of mind. However, his master had forgiven him, and continued to employ him, for the Tholoways had lived on the Common time out of mind, and had always worked for the Poysers. And on the whole, I daresay, society was not much the worse because Ben had not six months of it at the treadmill, for his views of depredation were narrow, and the House of Correction might have enlarged them. As it was, Ben ate his roast beef to-night with a serene sense of having stolen nothing more than ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... painted pasteboard round a green table for the piddling concern of a few shillings, can only be excused in folly or superannuation. It is like riding on a rocking-horse, where your utmost exertion never carries you a foot forward; it is a kind of mental treadmill, where you are perpetually climbing, but can never rise an inch. From these hints, my readers will perceive I am incapacitated for one of the pleasures of old age, which, though not mentioned by Cicero, is not the least frequent resource in the present day—the club-room, and ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... a treadmill? Think not of the grind, But think of the grist, what is done and to do, The world growing better, more like to God's mind, By long, faithful labor of helpers ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... Little can be laid up for old age, except by the most painful economy and daily scrimping; and how can the children consent to stay on, starving body and soul? That explains the 3,318 abandoned farms in Maine at present. And the farmers' wives! what monotonous, treadmill lives! Constant toil with no wages, no allowance, no pocket money, no vacations, no pleasure trips to the city nearest them, little of the pleasures of correspondence; no time to write, unless a near relative is dead or dying. Some one says that their only chance for social life ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... but very few of them will go out of their way to do good, if, by being "bad," they can snatch a personal advantage without anybody being any the wiser. "Life would be endurable if it were not for its pleasures," they declare in the face of a pile of social invitations. Yet they still endure that treadmill of entertainments which makes up a London season, only showing their real feelings by moaning to themselves in the process. They freely acknowledge that very few of these entertainments really entertain, but to miss being seen at them would be to risk a disaster ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... laughed, grimly, staring up at her. "I'm not his sort. There are no heroics about me. Men of my stamp don't make theatrical exits; we're too confoundedly sane. Whether we do well or whether we do ill, we plod along on our treadmill round, from the house to the office, and from the office to the grave, as if we never had anything on the conscience. But if I had the spirit of Bienville, do you ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... Donald M'Leod. Later Lamb sent Wilson, who seems to have asked for some verse about Defoe, the "Ode to the Treadmill," but Wilson ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... concentrated on the aerial acrobatics. The other half plodded a weary treadmill. In the nullite chamber beneath Sugar Loaf's summit, he thought, were three couples whose knowledge and wisdom had preserved them for the repeopling of the Earth. Their children, and their children's children—starting from such a source what ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... association with my fellow-fashionables. A man might as well have fled from his chamber to enjoy comfort in the wards of an hospital. In one of my marches up and down the pave of St. James's Street, that treadmill of gentlemen convicted in the penalty of having nothing to do, I lounged into the little hotel of the Guards, that stands beside the great hotel of the gamblers, like a babe under its mamma's wing—the likeness admirable, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... will extend the same favour to us," said Clayley: "God knows we stand in need of rest. I'd give them three months' pay for an hour upon the treadmill, only ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... we aged; but we went on from circuit to circuit with no other change except that when we saved enough money William bought a new horse. It is a terrible treadmill, and we could expect no reward or change in this world, no promotion, no ease of mind except the ease of prayers, which I never enjoyed as much as William did. I had feelings that prayers did not put ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... and economic reformer than of the political innovator. Gasworks, factories, hospitals, and prisons were in turn inspected. Cavour went thoroughly into the questions of prison labour and diet. He did not object to the treadmill in itself, but thought unfruitful labour demoralising. Useful work with a small gain reformed the convict. The prison fare seemed to him rather too good. He was impressed by the bread "as good as the best that is consumed ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... thing his love would be, when it should come, free of its tasks and obligations; no longer in the treadmill making her world go round, but given its ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... a taunt. In a hundred such homes the whir of many sewing-machines, worked by the sweater's slaves with weary feet and aching backs, drowned every feeble note of joy that struggled to make itself heard above the noise of the great treadmill. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... candle that will burn two hours, to burn it out and lie down in the darkness—to go through one such day and know that you have to endure three thousand six hundred and fifty-two days like it—that is about all. The life of a blind horse in a treadmill is varied and ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... the Penitentiary was established at Bellevue. In 1816, a portion of the almshouse was set apart for the punishment of felons, by the institution of the treadmill. This was on Twenty-sixth street, near First avenue, the present site of Bellevue Hospital, and its part occupancy as a prison somewhat relieved the overcrowded condition of the jail. The city jail still continued in City Hall Park, and was used as a ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... a treadmill with more hopeless despair than Buel worked in his little room under the lofty roof. He knew no one; there were none to speak to him a cheering or comforting word; he was ignorant even of the names of the men who accepted the articles from his pen, which appeared unsigned in the daily papers ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... would hate a thing that was so vile? In order that she might do so, he would persist in finding out what had been the circumstances of this young man's life. If, as he believed, the things which George Hotspur had done were such as in another rank of life would send the perpetrator to the treadmill, surely then she would not cling to her lover. It would not be in her nature to prefer that which was foul and abominable and despised of all men. It was after this, when he had seen Mr. Boltby, that the idea occurred to him of buying up Cousin George, so that Cousin George should himself ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... custom and usage, he was determined to make a new departure in the annals of modern sovereignty. Three years of continuous slavery on the treadmill of the Throne had been sufficient to make him thirst for freedom,—freedom of speech,—freedom of action. He had tacitly submitted to a certain ministry because he had been assured that the said ministry was popular,—but latterly, rumours ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... condition of the parts, arising from the action of antagonistic forces, in which they endeavor to return to their natural state." Exactly. There are thousands of women in just this condition, sustained there by the daily pressure and excitement of hurry, and by a stern, unyielding "must." In the treadmill of their household labor, breakfast, dinner, and supper revolve in ceaseless course, and they must step forward to meet them. And, when more of her vitality is expended daily than is daily renewed by food and rest, woman ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... was not so pleasant. The two gamblers who tempted the old man to steal Mrs. Jarley's strong box were detected in another crime and sent to jail. Brass became a convict, condemned to walk on a treadmill, chained to a long line of other evil men, and dragging wherever he went a heavy iron ball. After he was released he joined his wicked sister, Sally, and the two sank lower and lower till they might even be seen ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... spelling the name of the blamed thing so as to get the same right wunst any way—is played wid the feet. You slide the sheet wid the holes punched into 'em into the wrack over the keeze and then wurrk the feet up and down like yer husband Tana used to do at home in the treadmill. ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... principles that the Struggle for Existtence has been too much for. They are a wonderful system. The weak morality is supplied with bread and water and a cell to develop in, and it is exercised on a treadmill, and allowed to expand and pick oakum, and so it is turned into ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... remedied anything since the world began. Wickedness is nearly always, perhaps always, a moral invalidism, and we shall see some day that to punish men for crime by being cruel to them is like condemning a man to the treadmill for having typhoid fever. I can only say that the more I have known of human beings, and the older I grow, the more lovable, gentle, sweet-tempered I have found ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to most of us who, like Bickley, think ourselves learned? A round, short but still with time and to spare wherein to be dull and lonesome; a fateful treadmill to which we were condemned we know not how, but apparently through the casual passions of those who went before us and are now forgotten, causing us, as the Bible says, to be born in sin; up which ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... he was hurting her, but his insurgent youth demanded its right of speech after long repression. "I'm a man," he cried, "and I want to do a man's work in the world and take a man's place. Just because my ancestors chose to slave in a treadmill, I don't have to stay in it, do I? You have no right to keep me ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... times and seasons, however, as for example at all high feasts and festivals, Tu-Kila-Kila had respite for a while from this constant treadmill of mechanical divinity. Whenever the moon was at the half-quarter, or the planets were in lucky conjunctions, or a red glow lit up the sky by night, or the sacred sacrificial fires of human flesh were lighted, then Tu-Kila-Kila could lay aside his ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... Elsie had had dimples when she came, she would have lost them ere this," said Mrs. Middleton with unusual energy. "She's been put right into a treadmill, Jack. Only sixteen, sweet sixteen, and she hasn't had any of the gayety a young girl wants and needs, but has just slaved from morning until night ever since she came to us. At her age, she ought to be going to dances ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... us all before the assizes, mother. We'll never get off without the treadmill, any way: it's well av' the whole kit of us don't have to go over the wather at ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... the uppermost idea in my mind for some time after that. Other thoughts there were, of course, but that one of never-ending descent outweighed them all for a time. As we got lower the temperature increased; then perspiration broke out. Never having practised on the treadmill, my muscles ere long began to feel the unwonted exercise, and I thought to myself, "If you are in this state so soon, what will you be when you get to the bottom, and how ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... endeavoured to express its pleasure and satisfaction by walking round and rubbing itself against a person, raising and putting down its fore-feet alternately, with the toes extended, as if practising the goose step or working on some feline treadmill, why that cat did then. The poor animal could not speak, of course, but it really seemed to utter some inarticulate sounds that must have been in cat language a paean of joy and praise and thanks at its deliverance; ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... had been striving like any warrior against the powers and principalities of human wills and passions, and had grounded her arms after a victory which had left her wounded almost to death, carried her bleeding heart and walked her woman's treadmill. She scoured faithfully the pewter dishes and the iron pots. She swept the hearth clean and baked and brewed and spun and sewed. Her lot would have been easier had her woe befallen her generations before, and she could, instead, have backed her heavy load of tenting through the ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager of a Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many thanks to him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did not account him a god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us;—on which point there were much to be said. But I will say rather, or repeat: In spite of the sad state Hero-worship now lies in, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... for poorer folks, and when he's made beggars of 'em he'll give 'em charity. I won't forgive him! I wish he might be punished with shame till his own son 'ud like to forget him. I wish he may do summat as they'd make him work at the treadmill! But he won't,—he's too big a raskill to let the law lay hold on him. And you mind this, Tom,—you never forgive him neither, if you mean to be my son. There'll maybe come a time when you may make him feel; it'll never come to me; I'n got my head under the yoke. Now ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... on a treadmill here. Perhaps by the time you come on in December I will be able to report something accomplished. But oh! the misery of dealing with people who are eternally suspicious and have ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... extending over several days and the other large enough to take in several individuals at once and to have installed apparatus and working machinery requiring larger space than that furnished by any of the other calorimeters. Near the chair calorimeter a special calorimeter with treadmill is ...
— Respiration Calorimeters for Studying the Respiratory Exchange and Energy Transformations of Man • Francis Gano Benedict
... the treadmill of endless dishes, dirtied as fast as cleansed; there were beds, and beds, and beds; gravies and soups and stews. And always the querulous voice of the sick woman in the front bedroom demanding another hot water ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... was never yet heard to say to wife, or child, or servant that he was pleased. He never says that a meal is to his taste or a seat set so as to shelter and repose him. The obstinate man makes his house a very prison and treadmill to himself and to all those who are condemned to suffer with him. And all the time it is not that he does not love and honour his household; but by an evil law of the obstinate heart its worst obstinacy and mulishness comes out among ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... parts, and to the sinking of a well in the marsh behind his pavilion. The design of this well was extremely ingenious. It was worked by means of a wheel, nine feet in diameter, with steps in its circumference like those of a treadmill, and so weighted that by walking upon it, as if up a flight of stairs, a person of eleven or twelve stone would draw up a bucket—two buckets being so hung, at the ends of a rope surrounding the wheel, that while one ascended, full of water, the other, ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... She has already taught Europe many things in the sphere of Invention, and is destined to teach her many more; and the fact that her Carriages are condemned as too light and her Pianos as too heavy, her Reaping Machines as "a cross between a treadmill and a flying chariot," &c., &c., by critics very superficially acquainted with their uses, and who have barely glanced at them in passing, proves nothing but the rashness and hostility of their contemners. From such unworthy disparagement I appeal with confidence ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... one more year: there is no return. Press onward, still onward, for weal or woe. Beat heart: throb brain: hot eyelids burn: Man's troubles and trials who cares to know? Birth, marriage, and death: death, marriage, and birth, Are the treadmill steps of this wheel of strife; Cloak, draught, and a crust—then a hole in the earth: And the struggle for these is the ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... I wasn't to,' rejoined Master Bardell, 'I'm a-goin' to have some, I am.' Cheered by this prospect, the precocious boy applied himself to his infantile treadmill, with ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... my want of curiosity reminds me that on this very occasion Charles Greville offered to take me all over the Coldbath Fields Prison, and show me the delights of the treadmill, etc., and expressed great astonishment that I did not enthusiastically accept this opportunity of seeing such a cheerful spectacle, and still more amazement at my general want of enlightened curiosity, which he appeared to consider quite unworthy ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... humanity; and Mr. HOBLER—albeit in the present case the word is not reported—doubtless cried "Amen!" to the wisdom of the alderman. Sir PETER henceforth stands sentinel at the gate of death, and any hungry pauper who shall recklessly attempt to touch the knocker, will be sentenced to "the treadmill for a month as a rogue ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 13, 1841 • Various
... and if it be The Swede Karl Gustaf, I commend her choice. I will go seek my lands upon the Rhine. There will I build and raze again to earth With sweating brow, and sow and gather in, As though for wife and babe, enjoy alone; And when the harvest's gathered, sow again, And round and round the treadmill chase my days Until at evening they sink ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... human creatures seem so dear and so desirable: but I seemed like a cold ghost; therefore I cast off their dust from my feet for a testimony. Nay, I did more. I spurned the world under my feet so that it swung full circle like a treadmill.' ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... the gravity of the beggars," he laughed. "Not a smile on them. Solemn as Presbyterians. 'Tention! Present! Recover! Not a lazy bone in their bodies. I say, Collins: a person could make a perpetual motion, with a fly on a sort of a treadmill? Ah! but then it would n't pass muster unless it went of its own accord—would it? Perpetual motion's a thing I've been giving my attention to lately. You remember you advised me to study mechanics? Well, I 've been thinking of arranging a clock so as to wind itself up as it went on. That 's one ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... You see Mr. Firedamp has got as far as possible out of his way. Next to him is Sir Simon Steeltrap, of Steeltrap Lodge, Member for Crouching-Curtown, Justice of Peace for the county, and Lord of the United Manors of Spring-gun-and-Treadmill; a great preserver of game and public morals. By administering the laws which he assists in making, he disposes, at his pleasure, of the land and its live stock, including all the two-legged varieties, with and without feathers, in a circumference of several miles ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... that summer was spent in improving forty acres of his farm, on which he raised some sod corn and vegetables, Our corn for bread was ground in Mr. Wigglesworth's treadmill, turned by-oxen. We had no fruit for many years, but a few wild sorts, and the vegetables were a welcome variation in our diet of ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... substitute for vigorous thought and action,—a lion endeavoring to dine on grass and green leaves. In some cases this mental chlorosis reached such a height as almost to nauseate one with Nature, when in the society of the victims; and surfeited companions felt inclined to rush to the treadmill immediately, or get chosen on the Board of Selectmen, or plunge into any conceivable drudgery, in order to feel that there was still work enough in the universe to keep it sound and healthy. But this, after all, was exceptional ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... she said. "If you only knew what it is to feel free after the dull, aching, monotonous misery of the last few years. To be constantly on the treadmill, to be in the grasp of a pitiless scoundrel. At first you fight against it passionately, with a longing to be doing something, and gradually you give way to despair. And now the weight is off my shoulders, and I am free to act. Fancy the reward ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... delightful of Euripidean dramas, as well as, by modern standards, the most easily actable. And I notice that many judges who display nothing but a fierce satisfaction in sending other plays of that author to the block or the treadmill, show a certain human weakness in sentencing ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... houses, &c., may alter its properties. After the root is taken from the ground it is placed in a mill, and is thereby cleansed of its exterior excrescences; it is then thoroughly washed, when it is ready for the large machine, the principle of which is similar to the "treadmill." A horse is placed on something like a platform, and as he prances up and down, the machinery is set in play. A person stands at the end, and places the root in the wheel of the machine, which, after being ground, ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... asked you to invite her-that would have been treacherous. No, but when I began to realise what it would be to send her back to her treadmill; though the beauty of it is that she never seems to realise ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... discouraging debut, the filly's education went on and prospered. She marched discreetly along the roads in long reins; she champed detested mouthfuls of rusty mouthing bit in the process described by Johnny Connolly as "getting her neck broke"; she trotted for treadmill half-hours in the lunge; and during and in spite of all these penances, she fattened up and thickened out until that great authority, Mr. Alexander, pronounced it would be a sin not to send her up to the Dublin ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... him: 'you are watched to be caught in inexactitudes.' Erasmus knows it: he will correct all later, he will ever have to revise and to polish everything. He hates the labour of revising and correcting, but he submits to it, and works passionately, 'in the treadmill of Basle', and, he says, finishes the work of ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... breakfast. They were earnest, serious, land seekers, not tourists. In the main they were goodly folks worn by a monotony of life; men who had worked and women who had saved through long, gray years, buoyed up by the hope of a comfortable haven in old age to compensate them for a lifetime on the treadmill. Some of them were farmers, some small-towners, two or three were from cities; and the spell of dreams, and of Granger, was upon them all. They were dazzled, dazed. On their native heaths, perhaps as shrewd as any, ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... From this Giottesque treadmill, painting was released by the intervention of another art. The painters were hopelessly mediocre; their art was snatched from them by the sculptors. Orcagna himself, perhaps the only Giottesque who gave ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... finds that two-thirds of the reforms for which men labour would not be needed if the artificialities of society were abandoned. He is, of course, unpractical and self-centred. Listen to Thoreau, the arch-enemy of the social treadmill, and ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... soon make you, my son. It's like this: I feel just like a squirrel in a cage, galloping on over miles of wire and never getting a bit farther, or like one of those chaps on the old-fashioned treadmill, who were always going upstairs, but never got ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... as I saw him every morning, in the carpet slippers he wore in the house and the black clothes no tailor could make really fit his gaunt, bony frame, was a homely enough figure. The routine of his life was simple, too; it would have seemed a treadmill to most of us. He was an early riser, when I came on duty at eight in the morning, he was often already dressed and reading in the library. There was a big table near the centre of the room: there I have seen him reading many times. And the book? It was the ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... and fancies, grave or gay, Before us at his bidding come The Treadmill tramp, the One-Horse Shay, The dumb despair of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... pleasant ever does happen in this family," said Meg, who was out of sorts. "We go grubbing along day after day, without a bit of change, and very little fun. We might as well be in a treadmill." ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... comic poet, was one of the earliest of Roman writers. Born at Sarsina in Umbria, of free parentage, he at first worked on the stage at Rome, but lost his savings in speculation. Then for some time he worked in a treadmill, but finally gained a living by translating Greek comedies into Latin. Twenty of his plays have come down to us. They are lively, graphic, and full of fun, depicting a mixture of Greek ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... and it was late in the evening, when she sat down, tired and faint, with a great bundle of girls' themes or compositions to read over before she could rest her weary head on the pillow of her narrow trundle-bed, and forget for a while the treadmill stair of labor she was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... sent out no sparks, he carried his own fuel, he made little noise, and he would not explode. His only failing was that he would leave the track; and to remedy this defect the early railroad builders hit upon a happy device. Sometimes they would fix a treadmill inside the car; two horses would patiently propel the caravan, the seats for passengers being arranged on either side. So unformed was the prevalent conception of the ultimate function of the railroad, and so pronounced was the fear of monopoly that, ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... girl shall we encourage to enter office work? Not the girl whose talent lies in making things, for to her the routine of the office will be a weary and endless treadmill entirely barren of results; nor the girl who requires the stimulus of people to keep her alert and keyed to her best work; nor the girl who cannot be happy at indoor work. Office work seems to require a temperament in which pleasure in arrangement takes precedence over joy in ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... earliest of these threshing machines containing a cylinder was run by a treadmill on which a horse was used. It was literally a "one-horse" affair. Of course the first type of cylinder was small and simple, and the work as a rule was poorly done. The chaff and the straw came out together and men had ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... But, a propos of your compliments, may I ask if it was only to treat me to them in full that you brought me up those confounded tower steps this morning? Because, in that case, I wouldn't have minded waiting, you know. It's hardly fair upon a man, is it, to put him to the treadmill before he's well ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... ferriage over the Styx), that it is hard to shove him from me to the perspective distance—hard to shut my own partial eyes, and look at him through other people's. I will try, however; and, as it is done with but one foot off from the treadmill of my ceaseless vocation, you will excuse ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... 1885. USNM 213356; 1958. A horse-powered treadmill made chiefly of wood, with metal parts where the wear would be greatest. It was used to produce power for belt-driven equipment such as threshers or fanning mills. The machine is set in motion by putting a horse in the pen and releasing ...
— Agricultural Implements and Machines in the Collection of the National Museum of History and Technology • John T. Schlebecker
... his head as he spoke, his face charming with a humorous smile, an illuminated eye—"now, I ask you, if you would be so hard-hearted as to desire me—with but twenty-five years at my disposal, remember—to spend them in a treadmill of work when I might be spending them under the pines and the beeches with ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... this personal affiliation of pianola and pianolist, of instrument and player, has been worked out, so that the player is not a mere human treadmill pumping air into a cabinet on castors, but—whether he be a lawyer, merchant, financier, dressmaker, milliner, or society leader; one of the Four Hundred or one of the eighty million—a musical artist ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... old stopping place this world is, anyway. How hard we have to work just to keep the flesh on our bones and that flesh covered, even with nothing better than homespun. And we are getting a little tired of it all, aren't we, my dear? Just a little tired of the treadmill, where, like a sheep in a dairy, we pace our limited beat to bring a handful of inadequate butter. We have trudged to and fro about long enough, and have half a mind to throw up the contract with fate. But hold on a bit. There ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... religious fatalism of ancestors whose God was a God of vengeance. She did not concern herself as to what all this vengeance was about; life was a trap into which all mortals walked sooner or later, and her particular trap had a treadmill,—a round of household duties she kept whirling with an energy that might have made their fortunes if she had been the head of the family. It is bad to be a fatalist unless one has an incontrovertible belief in one's destiny,—which Hannah ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... The treadmill round of duties that Makes any life inane and flat, Without diversion sandwiched in, The drudgery, the overplus Of toil and trouble ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... think I may be wrong, but I don't see how—unless by pure chance—I can be anything else. For I can't discover what is right. I see women all round me actuated by this frenzied sense of duty; I see them toiling submissively at their eternal treadmill; occupying their best years in the business of filling their nurseries; losing their youth, narrowing their intelligence, ruining their husbands, and clouding their very moral sense at last. Well, I know that such conduct is supposed to be right and virtuous. But I can't see it. It impresses me ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... of the laws of human mature," said the Traveller; "and for the sake of GOD'S working world and its wholesomeness, both moral and physical, I would put the thing on the treadmill (if I had my way) wherever I found it; whether on a pillar, or in a hole; whether on Tom Tiddler's ground, or the Pope of Rome's ground, or a Hindoo fakeer's ground, or ...
— Tom Tiddler's Ground • Charles Dickens
... followed the negro into what had been called the engine-room, though to Winn's eye it looked as little like an engine-room as any place he had ever known. At one side was a horse-power treadmill, such as he had often seen used for the sawing of wood. Half of it was sunk below the level of the deck, and covered with a removable floor. It was geared in the most direct and simple manner to a shaft that disappeared ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... spend an hour a day in exercise. In an hour one can, without making too great haste, walk three miles. At this rate, a year's walking represents over a thousand miles. Relaxation is essential to keep up the spirit and prevent life from becoming monotonous, as if one were sentenced to perpetual treadmill. Recreation is necessary, and the pursuit of ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... rose up in a sudden rebellion against this "personally conducted" career in life. "I am to be a mere hoodwinked worker in this millionaire's treadmill. A bond slave to one of the great Trusts which are chaining the whole American population to the galley-oar ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... stood for something besides amusement, sharply as some of them were identified with all that was brilliant in the social life of the city. They read all that was best in serious literature and fiction as soon after it came out as their treadmill would permit, and they gave somewhat more time to it than to poker. It was this small group, led by Mrs. Hunter, that in common with several wealthy and clever Jewish women, with intellectual members of old families that had long since dropped out of a society that ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... governmental mechanisms—like the tariff, for example, which we go on making more "scientific" year in, year out—having long since lost sight of their human purpose. They may be defeating the very ends they were meant to serve. We cling to constitutions out of "loyalty." We trudge in the treadmill and call it love of our ancient institutions. We emulate the mule, that greatest ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... I get drunk every day in my own room, that's vice, you can't touch me; if I take an extra glass for the first time in my life, and knock down the watchman, that's a crime which, if I am rich, costs me one pound—perhaps five pounds; if I am poor, sends me to the treadmill. If I break the hearts of five hundred old fathers, by buying with gold or flattery the embraces of five hundred young daughters, that's vice,—your servant, Mr. World! If one termagant wench scratches my face, makes a noise, and goes brazen-faced to the Old Bailey to swear ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... life—honor, fame, position, riches, and, above all, the consciousness of doing some good in the world. Oh, it is impossible for you to realize anything of the longing in woman's heart to be someone, to do something, and so to be relieved from the everlasting monotony of the treadmill, which, if men were obliged to submit to it, would make the ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... it. She tried to feel that, though she could not be saved without something which the God of perfect love could give her if he pleased, but might not please to give her, yet if she was not saved it would be all her own fault: and so ever the round of a great miserable treadmill of contradictions! For a moment she would be able to say this or that she thought she ought to say; the next the feeling would be gone, and she as miserable as before. Her friend made no attempt to imbue her with her own calm ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... of action when, with lamplight gloating o'er the scene, I bask at leisure in my den, and read my fav'rite magazine. And so all day I stay at home attending to the treadmill grind; but when night comes afar I roam, and leave the workday ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... provincial university in the north of France not long ago, I saw a peasant mother standing in the misty morning at the mouth of a small thresher, feeding into it the sheaves handed her by her husband, the horse in a treadmill furnishing the power. When I passed in the misty morning of the next day she was still feeding the yellow sheaves into the thresher; and I thought how much better that was ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... greatest noise comes from the barrel organs of huge size and played by steam, or sometimes by a patient horse clad in gay apparel who trudges a sort of treadmill which furnishes the motive power. In even these small towns of Ancient Flanders such as Douai, the old allegorical representations, formerly the main feature of the event, are now quite rare, and therefore ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... my dear fellow? Now you get upon your treadmill of business, and you must keep going, or break your legs. Think, too, of the jolly little rascals you have left! The beggars are the only aristocracy we have,—the only people who enjoy their dolce far niente. Look on the Common: who are there amusing themselves on a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... dawned; 'Tom and Jerry,' instead of running three hundred nights, would be as little endured on the stage as 'Monsieur Thomas' would be; the heroes who aspire toward that ideal are now consigned by public opinion to Rhadamanthus and the treadmill; while if, like Monsieur Thomas, they knocked down their own father, they would, instead of winning a good wife, be 'cut' by braver and finer gentlemen than Monsieur Thomas himself: but what does this fact prove save that England has at last discovered that the Puritan ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley |
