"Concertina" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... give you some account of my life on board. My time has passed very pleasantly: I have read a good deal; I have nearly finished Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, am studying Liebig's Agricultural Chemistry, and learning the concertina on the instrument of one of my fellow-passengers. Besides this, I have had the getting up and management of our choir. We practise three or four times a week; we chant the Venite, Glorias, and Te Deums, and sing one hymn. ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... own billet and wandering down the lane a way, I heard the sound of singing coming from a big brick barn on the roadside. I stood close under the blank wall at the back of the building, and listened. The men were singing "Auld Lang Syne" to the accompaniment of a concertina and a mouth-organ. They were taking parts, and the old tune—so strange to hear out in a village of France, in the war zone—sounded very well, with deep-throated harmonies. Presently the concertina changed ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... himself from his precarious position will never be known, as, at this juncture, Ben and La Salle, respectively, weary of playing a limited repertoire of psalm-tunes on the concertina, and reading the musty records of a long-forgotten "Sederunt of the quarterly Synod," as detailed in an old number of the Presbyterian Witness, interrupted the prolonged passage at arms by an invitation, to all so disposed, "to take a ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... towards the rear another series follows, and so on, until the lagging tail is enabled to wrinkle itself along. But the animal is endowed with the capacity of quite suddenly retracting its forepart like the bellows of a concertina, and when so compressed to heave it backward or in any direction, so that an immediate change of route is possible. The retraction and uplifting of the foreshortened part is astonishingly rapid in view ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... inch in diameter. Through it ran the light copper pipe which was connected at its other end to the pump. At the end of the passage this pipe had several joints like those of a gas bracket, and was folded on itself concertina-wise. ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... literature and the theatre; the air grows thick and stifling with evil speaking, and poisoned by the breath, not of two toads as in the winter, but of three. Besides the velvety baritone laugh and the giggle like the gasp of a concertina, the maid who waits upon us hears an unpleasant cracked "He, he!" like the chuckle of a ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... happy Hyena Who played on an old concertina. He dressed very well, And in his lapel He ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... and flocks of pigeons which frequented the lonely groves on the river-side, made vocal the world of air; flocks of wild ducks, or geese, went whirring down the long spaces of water between the trees on either bank; and some one with a fiddle or a concertina made musical the evening, while the singing voices of rough habitants rang ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... beast walked with a peculiar gait which varied between an uncertain lockstep and a stampede—but can best be described by the word "halting." The camel had a halting gait—and as he walked he alternately elongated and contracted like a gigantic concertina. ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... narrow limits of the cottage. The tiny house was exceedingly clean, and comfortably furnished. Everything seemed to be in its appointed place, even to the sleek cat sleeping on the hearth. There were a few books on a shelf, and a concertina upon a little table in the corner. When we entered, the old collier was busy with the slate and pencil, and an arithmetic before him; but he laid them aside, and, doffing his spectacles, began to talk with us. He said that they were a family ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh |
