"Piano" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... indistinct I knew that the scene was shifted from the South to the North. I saw a room comfortably furnished, with a fire smouldering in a porcelain stove. In a corner stood a stripped Christmas-tree, with its candles burned out. Against the wall between the two doors was a piano, on which a man was playing—a man who twisted his head now and again to look over his shoulder, sometimes at another and younger man standing by the stove, sometimes at a young woman who was dancing ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... mention the waste of time over what Arnold called "instrument knowledge." Years are spent by most upper-class boys and girls in half-learning several languages which they will never use, in acquiring the technique of the piano, or of some other art which they will never learn to practice with proficiency. There is, to be sure, a certain mental training in all this, but no more than can be found in more useful studies. A foreign language is essentially a tool for carrying on conversation with its users, or for utilizing ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... to the piano and began to play a march, and Bud, with a great flourish, unlocked and threw open the door of the ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... into place and was gone to welcome still later comers, Griswold had a chance to look around him. The readjusting mechanism was still at work. Beyond question it was all very different, strikingly different, from his forecastings. A young woman was at the piano, with a young man whose clothes fitted him and who was in nowise conscious of them, turning the music for her. There was a pleasant hum of conversation; the lights were not glaring; the furnishings were not in bad taste—on ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... sounds had always been strong within me. I used to make noises, keeping one hand on my throat while the other hand felt the movements of my lips. I was pleased with anything that made a noise and liked to feel the cat purr and the dog bark. I also liked to keep my hand on a singer's throat, or on a piano when it was being played. Before I lost my sight and hearing, I was fast learning to talk, but after my illness it was found that I had ceased to speak because I could not hear. I used to sit in my mother's lap all day long and keep my hands on her face ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... else that was agreeable to any one else, consistently with the dye of his coat, the Reverend Mr Larynx was at all times equally ready. When at Nightmare Abbey, he would condole with Mr Glowry,—drink Madeira with Scythrop,—crack jokes with Mr Hilary,—hand Mrs Hilary to the piano, take charge of her fan and gloves, and turn over her music with surprising dexterity,—quote Revelations with Mr Toobad,—and lament the good old times of feudal darkness with the ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... sea-going ships should be fitted with Sir William Thompson's Sounding Machine (see picture in B. J. Manual). This machine consists of a cylinder around which are wound about 300 fathoms of piano wire. To the end of this is attached a heavy lead. An index on the side of the instrument records the number of fathoms of wire paid out. Above the lead is a copper cylindrical case in which is placed a glass tube open only at the bottom and chemically colored inside. The pressure of the sea forces ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... the safer and uncompromising chronicle of several bad cases of diphtheria, then epidemic at Wingdam. When I left the dining-room, with an odd feeling that I had been supping exclusively on mustard and tea leaves, I stopped a moment at the parlor door. A piano, harmoniously related to the dinner bell, tinkled responsive to a diffident and uncertain touch. On the white wall the shadow of an old and sharp profile was bending over several symmetrical and shadowy curls. "I sez to ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... She was a woman that worked, like me, but yet she was wonderful differ'nt. That was when we had our shop together in the house where we lived with the boy—I'll come to him in a minute or two. Besides lace-makin', Calliope had a piano an' taught in the fittin'-room—that was the same as the dinin'-room. Six scholars took. Sometimes I think it was her knowin' ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... words, the little child is not equipped psychologically to hear complicated units. I wish some one could determine how the average four-year-old hears the harmony of a chord on the piano. Is it much except confusion? In the same way, he is not equipped to leap a span between units. I wish some one would determine the four-year-old's memory span for rhymes, for instance. The involutions, the suggestiveness ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... to the piano; there he turned and looked. "There is nothing to forgive, Cassy. You have been a good girl always. I am sorry, of course I am sorry, but you are not ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... sparkling fandango, and then Chydister Lundsford was called upon for a speech. He was not at all embarrassed and he talked fairly well; and when he was done they called upon me. I got up with one hand resting on the piano, and stood there, nervous at first, but strangely steady later on. I told them that I could not make a speech, but that with their permission I would tell them a story, one of my own. They cried out that they would rather have a story than ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... the general hospital in the noble asylum for the mute and blind. Of the latter there were thirty inmates. They played on the piano and sang very sweetly, and we were interested in seeing the mutes converse with each other in their sign language. One little fellow was asked by the matron to give us their name for Yankee. He quickly passed his fingers ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... over the C.P.R., expect results. The average Montrealer does not even know where he lives. He is said to spend forty minutes a day, indoor weather, at basketball. In summer he camps. Snapshotted in a sweater he looks like a compromise between Babe Ruth batting a home run and Hofmann playing the piano. ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... This laughter that sounded so strange because it was so late reminded Ellen of the first New Year's Eve that she and her mother had spent in Edinburgh. They had had no friends to first foot them, but they had kept it up very well. Mrs. Melville had played the piano, and Ellen and she had sung half through the Student's Song Book, and they had had several glasses of Stone's Ginger Ale, and there really had been a glow of firelight and holly berry brightness, for Mrs. Melville, birdlike in everything, had a wonderful faculty ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... fell into a merry measure. The accuracy with which every instrument performed its part was truly marvelous. He could not have struck the measure or the harmony more certainly from the keys of his own piano than from that large band. The sounds struggled forth so perfect and distinct that one almost expected to see them embodied, whirling in wild dance around him. Sometimes the air was so exquisitely ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... youngest pupils stood, violin in hand, while, at the piano, Betty Chase was playing the prelude. Lina Danford handled the bow cleverly, and played her little solo ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... about her wrist and neck were delicate lines of gold. She seemed tremendously at home and right just where she was, in that big hospitable room, cultured but Anglican, without pretensions or novelties, with a glow of bound books, with the grand piano that Miriam, his third daughter, was beginning to play so well, with the tea equipage of shining silver and ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... number of pieces, one of the best known and most popular of which is called the "Matrosen Marsch," which is to be purchased in all large music stores. He also holds his own as a first-class amateur performer, both on the violin and the piano. His sister, the crown princess of Greece, a pupil of Rufer, excels on the organ, as does also the widowed Empress Frederick, while there is not one of the children of the present kaiser who does not possess musical gifts of a high order, which are being developed both in theory and in practice ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... Amsterdam, there was placed in the apartments of the Empress a piano so constructed as to appear like a desk with a division in the middle, and in this space was placed a small bust of the Emperor of Russia. Soon after, the Emperor wished to see if the apartments of the Empress were suitable, and while visiting them perceived this ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... we sat again in the window seat. Her other guests faded here and there. For a time there were shadowy fancies from the piano, then the house was stilled. But outside an April rain was falling. It pelted the windowpanes as softly as driven petals. It made a fairy swish as of far-off waves, and we sat together in a dim light. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... wherever business can be had; floating theaters and opera companies, with large barges built as play-houses, towed from town to town by their gaudily-painted tugs, on which may occasionally be perched the vociferous "steam piano" of our circus days, "whose soul-stirring music can be heard for four miles;" traveling sawyers, with old steamboats made over into sawmills, employed by farmers to "work up" into lumber such logs as they can from time to ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... clumpety-clump!" of a stamp-mill on a shoulder of a hill high above the camp, drowned the whir and chirp of night insects, and from the second story of a house they passed they heard the crude banging of a piano, and a woman's strident voice wailing, "She may have seen better da-a-ys," with a mighty effort to ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... month in the city. This threw the entire charge of house and store on me. As soon, therefore, as possible, she sent me to the city to school, where I realized my aspiration of studying ancient history and the piano, and devoured the contents of the text-book of natural philosophy with an avidity I had never known for ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... a man's; I could distinguish that much. He appeared to be bending over something, while his hands flew hither and thither, as if they were performing a quick-step upon a piano. But no sound of music ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... Sir Leonardo Spaghetti Coyne, Mr. Hole said that he was not aware that the mortality among monkeys employed in the piano-organ industry during the late War was excessive. But he agreed that the fearlessness shown by the monkeys at the Zoo in the course of air-raids ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... house for a great many years, and a little girl grew up there, the daughter of my landlady. She used to slide down the bannisters very well, and she used to play the piano very badly. These two things worried me many a time. She used to bring me my meals in the morning and the evening, and often enough she'd stop to talk with me while I was eating. She was a very chatty girl and I was a talkative person ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... at it from time to time directly, like a besieged commander, pleased to verify the good estate of his defences. But in truth he was at peace. The rain falling in the street sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on the other side, the notes of a piano were wakened to the music of a hymn, and the voices of many children took up the air and words. How stately, how comfortable was the melody! How fresh the youthful voices! Markheim gave ear to it smilingly, as he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Some soft piano-notes alone Were sweet as faintly given, Where ladies, doubtless, cheered the hearth With song that winter-even. The city's many-mingled sounds Rose like the hum of ocean; They rather lulled the heart than roused Its pulse ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... the desire of approbation overrides the desire for warmth and convenience. And similarly in their education, the immense preponderance of "accomplishments" proves how here, too, use is subordinated to display. Dancing, deportment, the piano, singing, drawing—-what a large space do these occupy! If you ask why Italian and German are learned, you will find that, under all the sham reasons given, the real reason is, that a knowledge of those ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... There was a piano, it is true; but its top was loaded with handbills and posters announcing meetings, and the dust lay thick on its lid. The writing table was better suited to an office than a lady's "own room," and it was strewn ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... could not resist entering the room, and this, in spite of the apologetic air of Marie. The room looked as neat as I had imagined it, seeing it from the mirror of Marie's mind. I should say it scarcely needed that broom which still remained expectantly in Marie's hand. A piano, spider-legged, in the number and thinness of these supports, stood at one side of the room, weighed down with classic-looking music. A bouquet, that had been given by the hand of the prima donna to Marie, stood upon ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... to get the old thing down to cheer her up. I hadn't played any on it since I was a young fellow courtin' her mother. I don't believe I'd ever got her without that banjo," he added and laughed with great good humour. "Nancy don't think much of it," he went on. "She thinks it's nothin' beside the piano, but Raymond, here, is like me, he thinks it beats the piano ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... point, Mr. C. informed me that he had obtained the raps on the handle of his umbrella out of doors, when the child was by his side; and that the music-master complained of raps proceeding from inside the piano whenever the child was listless or inattentive at her music lesson. Mrs. C. told me that almost every night she heard the raps by the bedside of the child when she went to bid her good-night; and that after she had left ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... midnight, the President rose from his seat and asked Natasha to sing the "Hymn of Freedom." She acknowledged the request with an inclination of her head, and then as Radna sat down to the piano, and she took her place beside it, all the rest rose to their feet like worshippers ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... Mr. Reinhold Gliere has composed a magnificent musical setting with piano and orchestra accompaniment and dedicated it to a ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... musical should take a note on the piano enunciating the vowels in their natural order ([a], ay, ee, o, oo) on this note. Then proceed to the next note; the whole of the octave may thus be gone over. Choose an octave most consonant with the range of ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... in her way, a remarkable woman. She has been described by her daughter as "a great artist lost for want of development"; showing a wonderful dexterity in whatever she put her hand to, no matter if practiced in it or not. "She tried everything, and always succeeded"—sewing, drawing, tuning the piano—"she would have made shoes, locks, furniture, had it been necessary." But her tastes were simple and domestic. Though married out of her rank, she was entirely without any vain ambition to push herself into fashionable ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... probably know that sound is produced by rapid motion. Put your finger on a piano wire that is sounding, and you will feel the motion, or touch your front tooth with a tuning-fork that is singing; in the last case you will feel very distinctly the raps made by the vibrating fork. Now, a sounding body will not only jar another body which touches it, but ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... opposite sides of the wide-open door, Texas and Pat standing to welcome them. From one room to another Barbara ran in laughing delight, followed by the three, who were perspiring in an agony of suspense while Jefferson Worth looked on. The cook stove was not in the parlor, nor was the piano—out of place. In the proper room Barbara even found her trunks. There was a supply of provisions in the pantry and kindlings even ready by the kitchen stove for the morning fire. If there were little irregularities here and there, ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... but habit that we hung our stockings at the chimney—the piano would have done as well—for I retain but the slightest memory of a belief in Santa Claus: perhaps at most, as I have hinted, a far-off haze of wonder while looking through the window upon the snowy sky—at night a fancied clatter on the roof, if I lay awake. And therefore in ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... it was the business of the Mamsell belonging to the house to light a little army of Vienna coffee machines standing ready on the sideboard, so that coffee could be served when everyone went back to the drawing-room. The men smoked their cigars there too, and someone would play the piano, and when no music was going on there was harmless, rather dull, family conversation. The spinster cousins got out their embroidery, the Mamsells disappeared with the children, die Herren either talked to each other or had a quiet game of Skat. The women and some of the ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... the other shore and disembarked beneath the great trees. A cool freshness of damp earth permeated the air under the lofty and clustered branches, where there seemed to be as many nightingales as there were leaves. A distant piano began to ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... to the means by which the photoplay influences the mind of the spectator. If we try to understand and to explain the means by which music exerts its powerful effects, we do not reach our goal by describing the structure of the piano and of the violin, or by explaining the physical laws of sound. We must proceed to the psychology and ask for the mental processes of the hearing of tones and of chords, of harmonies and disharmonies, of tone qualities and tone intensities, of ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... ma'am,"—said Panshin, with a certain bright, sweet smile, which was wont to appear on his face, and suddenly to vanish,—pushed forward a chair with his knee, seated himself at the piano, and after striking several chords, he began to sing, clearly enunciating the words, the ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... of the other men, it afterwards appeared, was most in his element at the piano; so that they had coffee and comic songs upstairs—the gentlemen, temporarily relinquished, submitting easily in this interest to Mrs. Lowder's parting injunction not to sit too tight. Our especial young ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... when the garden was at its best. My cleaner's visit is always very delightful, because she makes the garden seem at least four times its usual size by sheer admiration; but this year, just as she was getting into her stride, it began to rain, and we had to seek refuge by the piano. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... devil can I do?" George asked, hopping about the pair; Mrs. Major's back as responsive to his touch as the keys of a piano to idle fingers. ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... from the establishment known as "Bert's Place," and was shocked on staring through his show window to observe the Honourable George and Cousin Egbert waltzing madly with the cow-persons, Hank and Buck, to the strains of a mechanical piano. The Honourable George had exchanged his top-hat for his partner's cow-person hat, which came down over his ears in a most ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... a piano, of course, but the crowning feature of the room, however, was the wide window seat built across the bow-window at its upper end. It was at least four feet wide, upholstered in thick green velvet and piled high with sofa pillows. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... "Buffalo Burnt, or the Dreadful Conflagration." It won such success among the farm-house gentry that the singer returned for another ballad and obtained it. Some years later Mr. Cooper was invited to a tea-party in a near village, when a young lady, led to the piano for music, began to sing, much to the author's disturbing amazement, "Buffalo Burnt, or ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... not hear the criticism till later, and then too often for my comfort. Memory holds a picture, more vivid than most, of a small boy reading the "Midsummer Night's Dream" by firelight, in a room where candles were lit, and some one touched the piano, and a young man and a girl were playing chess. The Shakespeare was a volume of Kenny Meadows' edition; there are fairies in it, and the fairies seemed to come out of Shakespeare's dream into the music ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... stuffed with saw-dust, continually expatiating on the sufferings of early Christians. I have never read Fox's Book of Martyrs. With Mrs. Lucretia McSimpkins I had some relief. She was fond of operatic music, and, it is true, banged our piano out of tune at every visit,—indeed, her efforts resembled a boiler-maker's establishment under full headway; but, when she did subside, her perfect and refreshing ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... brutal Russian whore-monger! I slipped quietly out into the street; night was coming on, and I walked down Madison and south on Peoria. Yes, there were the shanties—poor, wretched hovels, every one of them. Out shone the flickering red lights, out came the discordant, rasping sound of the rented piano, out belched the shrieks and groans of drunken harlots mingled with the curses of task-masters in a foreign tongue, attracting the attention of the hundreds of laborers, negroes and boys, as they ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... is. Well, I'll do my best; but tell Nora to be sure and get the fiddler from Hollymount. It's so stupid for her to be sitting there at the piano while ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... wife has objected to the purchase and notified the seller that she will not pay for the same. "Expenses of the family," are not limited to necessary expenses, but whatever is kept or used in the family is included in the term. A piano, an organ, a watch and other jewelry, a cook stove and fixtures, have all been held to come within the term "family expense," for which the property of the wife is liable. But a reaping machine, though used by the husband in the business by which he ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson
... imbibing a dissertation on Plotinus from the attic lips of S.T.C. Suddenly a cry arose of "Fire—fire!" upon which all of us, master and disciples, Plato and [Greek: hoi peri ton Platona], rushed out, eager for the spectacle. The fire was in Oxford Street, at a piano-forte maker's; and, as it promised to be a conflagration of merit, I was sorry that my engagements forced me away from Mr. Coleridge's party before matters were come to a crisis. Some days after, meeting with my Platonic host, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... starting to speak. He swayed back a half step with a flicker of change crossing his face then stood steady and smiling again. That brief grimace touched Bryce's nerves with a sensation that was like the jangle of something heavy dropped inside a piano, a sound he had heard once. But the numbness did not lift from his feelings. He was still smiling. The third bullet would be ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... now whenever I get a chance to. I think it is splendid and always amusing. I can play lots of little duets on the piano with ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... reserve. As I have already said, in another chapter, I never knew a member of my father's family to kiss another member of it except once, and that at a death-bed. And our village was not a kissing community. The kissing and caressing ended with courtship—along with the deadly piano-playing of that day. ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... spoke and once more opened the lid of a piano box that was standing on the floor near them. The box apparently was filled with oats and they had inspected it before, but as it had not presented any appearance of containing the object of their search they had passed it by and gone on to ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... enthusiastically; but that he was still puzzled over the very necessary word to fit the strongly marked refrain. However, he was not going to give it up. Next morning, when Grieg was in his room peacefully giving a piano lesson to a young lady, a furious ringing was heard at his front-door bell, as if the ringer would tear the bell from its wires, followed by a wild shout of "'Fremad! Fremad!' Hurrah, I have got it! 'Fremad!'" Bjornson, for of course the intruder was he, rushed into the house the moment the ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... the seats away from the center. There should be one less chair than there are participants in the game. The participants form a line around the outside of the chairs and march forward around the chairs, while the piano, phonograph, or some other musical instrument is being played. The instant the music stops each player tries to sit in a chair. The one failing to get a chair drops out of the game. A chair is taken from the circle and the group starts marching again ...
— School, Church, and Home Games • George O. Draper
... as string that snaps beneath the bow, and revolved with the music-stool, to catch but her echoes in the empty room. None had entered behind her back; there was neither sound nor shadow in the deep veranda through the open door. But for the startled girl at the open piano, Mrs. Clarkson's sanctum was precisely as Mrs. Clarkson had left it an hour before; her own photograph, in as many modes, beamed from the usual number of ornamental frames; there was nothing whatever to confirm a wild suspicion of the living lady's untimely return. ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... piano can be tuned, so can the mind. Man's body is made up of twelve octaves the same as in music. All matter is music. All matter is composed of twelve octaves. Wrong thinking brings inharmony in some of the octaves of our body. ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... girl would want or love was there. There was nothing left undone—unremembered. The soft Chesterfield lounge, which was not too big and was placed near the fire, the writing table, the books, the piano of satinwood inlaid with garlands; the lamp to ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... luxuriously furnished drawing-room. Double doors, centre, opening to hall and stairway. Grand piano at right, fireplace next to it, with large easy-chair in front. Centre table; windows left, ...
— The Naturewoman • Upton Sinclair
... children, she found it impossible. Despite the fact that her attention had been focussed so strongly on them, the fringe of her vision had included their surroundings, the costly furniture, the piano against the farther wall, the music rack. Evidently the girl was learning to play. She felt a renewed, intenser bitterness against her own lot: she was aware of something within her better and finer than the girl, than the woman who had been her mother had possessed—that in her, Janet, had lacked ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... flavour. The attentions of the bailiff and his lady were likewise unremitting; indeed, the latter was almost too kind, for she seemed anxious that we should eat of every dish, and drink out of every flask and bottle. We had a little music too,—for she played the piano; and the commissary, likewise a performer, paid us the compliment to dash off in very good style, "God save the King." But the circumstance which amused me most of all remains to be stated. I was asked if I played chess; and I replied in the ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... through the sky. But regularly they dipped their wings in pitch black; Notting Hill, for instance, or the purlieus of Clerkenwell. No wonder that Italian remained a hidden art, and the piano always played the same sonata. In order to buy one pair of elastic stockings for Mrs. Page, widow, aged sixty-three, in receipt of five shillings out-door relief, and help from her only son employed in Messrs. Mackie's dye-works, suffering in winter with ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... strange, long-past agitation. In dimensions it was similar to the dining-room, running from front to back of the house. Here, too, was another elaborate candelabrum, somewhat smaller than the first, queer, spindle-legged, fiddle-backed chairs, beautiful cabinets and tables, and an old, square piano, still open. The chairs stood in irregular groups of twos and threes, chumming cozily together as their occupants had doubtless done, and over the piano had been carelessly thrown a long, filmy silk scarf, one end hanging ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... standing in the wide center hallway that ran straight through the house. On one side, through a wide archway, could be seen a large living-room with piano, bookshelves, comfortable chairs, a couch, and a good-sized table. Beyond that there was a narrow hall with two large rooms leading from it. From the other side of the center hall opened another narrow hall at right ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... through the vibrations received through their hands or feet. They receive, of course, only the more intense, or largest, sound waves, and can not hear notes of music nor spoken words, though they may feel the vibration when a piano is played. And, as Ned has said, no sound ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Scout - or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky • Victor Appleton
... door and entered a somewhat gorgeously furnished salon. There were signs here of feminine occupation, an open piano, and the smell of ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... courtesy of Steinway & Co. in placing in the State building one of the finest instruments ever turned out by this famous firm of piano builders. Its purity of tone and singing qualities were remarkable, and during the season several recitals were given upon it by eminent musicians. The piano was appropriately named "The Wave," illustrating as it did the wonderful waterways of the ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... 'Viva la Compagnie!'" said Telford, seating himself at the piano, and playing the first bars of that well-known air, to which, in our meetings, we were accustomed to improvise a ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the kitchen, where the fire was crackling in the stove and the evening meal already well under way. Out in the small back yard was George, Jr., frolicking with a young dog he had recently purchased, and in the parlour Jessica was playing at the piano, the sounds of a merry waltz filling every nook and corner of the comfortable home. Every one, like himself, seemed to have regained his good spirits, to be in sympathy with youth and beauty, to be inclined to joy and merry-making. ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... all swear by Hayne because he's a good fellow and sings a jolly song and plays the piano—and poker. One of these days he'll swamp you all, sure as shooting. He's in debt now, and it'll fetch him before you know it. What he needs is to be under a captain who could discipline him a little. ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... whether he were fit company for my sister, and I found him much superior to his name-gentlemanlike and intelligent, not ill-read, and pretty safe, like most Yankees, to know how to behave to a young girl. When he found I could accompany my sister on piano or violin he was transported. Moreover, he could endure to be enlightened by a Britisher on such little facts as the true history of Auld Robin Gray and the Wacht am Rhein. The lecture was a marked success. We have another tonight, ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Garrow's tea and cut the leaves of the Revue des Deux Mondes, which he invariably read until he dressed for dinner, she stole away to the further room, where she could play the piano, write letters, muse over novels, or indulge in reverie without fear of interruption. But as she entered it that afternoon its air of peace seemed the bleakness of desolation. A terrible and afflicting grief swept, like an icy breeze, through her heart, and, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... such a look as would have turned a mahogany piano leg into a mound of smoking ashes, and slammed the key into ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... all in the house, and she could not sing without. Mr Enderby would fetch some, if she would give him directions what to bring. No; she could not sing without the piano. As it was clearly impossible to bring that, Philip feared the company must wait for the pleasure of hearing Miss Grey till another time. Mr Grey would have Hester and Margaret sing; and sing they did, very simply and sweetly, and much to the satisfaction of all ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... change that had taken place in the man since I had last met him in 1867. Then he was really very ordinary-looking—with a moustache, an unwrinkled face, and a sloping forehead. The only wonderful thing about him was his melancholy. When I was playing the piano, once, in the green room at the Queen's Theatre, he came in and listened. I remember being made aware of his presence by his sigh—the deepest, profoundest, sincerest sigh I ever heard from any human being. He asked me if I would not play the piece again. ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... had settled Bobs on a young cousin we got on quite quickly. We left her old dance programmes and several unimportant things of doubtful ownership to her greatest rival; her piano (with three notes missing), on which she had learnt to play as a child, to her Aunt in Australia, said Aunt to pay carriage and legacy duty; her violin to the people in the next flat; her French ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... dance; I cannot recite verse nor play upon the piano; I am no acrobat nor leaper nor high kicker; yet I wish to go upon the stage. ...
— American Fairy Tales • L. Frank Baum
... of the trade that you learn, as a girl learns the notes of her piano. There's nothing in it. You forget it all the next hour. But when a man has been hung whom you have striven to save, you do remember that. Good-morning, Mr. Wickerby. I'll be there a little before ten. Perhaps you may ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... tutor. It took the form of a remonstrance and an explanation. The remonstrance pointed out that his work was desultory and liable to be interrupted at any moment, for any caprice: that steady grind was incompatible with the giving away of whole mornings to musical dreams at the piano, or to rambles in the woods, a book of poetry in hand. The explanation was to the effect that the great prizes of the world are all within the reach of every clever lad who starts with a sufficiency of means and is not afraid of work; and that he himself—none other—possessed abilities ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... a call should not, while waiting for a hostess, touch an open piano, walk about the room examining pictures, nor handle any ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... are the succession of repeated designs in mouldings and wainscotings (for example, the alternation of egg and dart), the series of windows in a wall, or of the columns of a Greek temple, or of the black and white keys of a piano. Still more complex is the balanced arrangement of straight lines and curves in a geometrical design, as in certain Oriental rugs or the Gothic rose windows. And probably the most complex spatial rhythms are those of the facades of great buildings like the Gothic cathedrals ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... with Jim; she had beauty and a curious primitive strength. Jim leaned forward, smiling as he talked to her; they talked confidentially, like tried comrades. Evelyn was moved to something near anger and went to the old grand piano Jim had brought from the drawing-room when he found that Carrie could play ragtime airs. Evelyn had a talent for music and meant to make an experiment. If Jim was what she thought, he ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... for him, until at last he gained the broad gravel path, at the end of which—oh, how far away they seemed!—were the three lighted windows of the drawing-room. He could see the interior quite plainly, and the group round the piano where the shaded lamp made a spot of brilliant colour. What were they all doing? Were they huddled together, waiting, watching in an agony of suspense? Nothing of the kind: it will be scarcely credited, perhaps, but this heartless domestic circle were positively ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... Fort Worth for a piano, already, and for a lady to come out for a coupla days and show me how to play it!" There was another black hiatus in the conversation. "We haven't got a spare room, but—I'm quick at learnin' tunes. She could bunk in with me ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... B. E. Martin and the etchings, and followed it with the Scotch-Irish Christening. My, but the Martin is a darling story! Next, the head tenor from the Opera sang half a dozen great songs that set the company wild, yes, mad with delight, that nobly handsome young Damrosch accompanying on the piano. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... find lots of gold there. And the first lot that comes to me is goin' to be spent for a self-playin' piano. But what happened here?" Billee asked, for he was now aware that something unusual ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... with him to the landing, where she kept him for about ten minutes complaining of the awful worry she had had about the under-housemaid, and of the sickening impossibility of getting a piano-tuner to attend to the instrument properly without ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... yet the assurance of such power in the preparation of the whole, that we knew her to be merely running over the chords of our appetite with preliminary savors, as a musician acquaints his touch with the keys of an unfamiliar piano before breaking into brilliant and triumphant execution. Within a week she had mastered her instrument; and thereafter there was no faltering in her performances, which she varied constantly, through inspiration or from ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... must prepare some pretty rooms for her, Spruce, those two at the top of the house that look right over the lawn and woods—and make everything as cosy as you can. I'll put the finishing touches. And I must send to London for a grand piano. There's only the dear old spinet in the drawing-room,—it's sweet to sing to, and Cicely will love it,—but she must have a glorious 'grand' as well. I shall wire to her to- day,—I know she'll come ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... at some of the large hotels fully bears out her assertion. Miss M talks of young ladies being taken to the piano in a promiscuous company. I have seen them go to the piano without being taken there, sit down and sing with all the energy of peacocks, before total strangers, and very often without accompaniment. In the hotels, the private ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... ran down the hill to where Granny lived. It was a tiny little house, not much larger than a piano box, but it was plenty large enough for Granny, for Granny was only two feet high. Some people even thought Granny was ...
— Friendly Fairies • Johnny Gruelle
... criticism on music itself, but added in a soft, disapproving way: "That man has no music in him. Do you know that was one of Mendelssohn's delicious dreams. This is how it should have been rendered," and he went impulsively to the piano and then the sweet monotonous cadences and melodious reveries slipped from his long white fingers till the whole room was permeated with a delicious sense of moonlit solitude and conversation was stilled in its languor. The young ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... early vogue of the cafe in Paris, a chanson, entitled Coffee, reproduced here, was set to music with accompaniment for the piano by M.H. Colet, a professor of harmony at the Conservatoire. Printed in the form of a placard, and put up in cafes, it received the approbation of, and was signed by, de Voyer d'Argenson, at that time (1711) lieutenant of police. The poetry is not irreproachable. It can hardly be attributed ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... "ready-made outfitter's," and the Cheap Jack's caravan; were seized upon, broken up, the splinters piled in a heap, anointed with naphtha and ignited almost before Mr. Mayow had time to mount an empty barrel, tune his "A" string by the piano, and dash into the opening bars of the Furry Dance. And almost before she knew it, Hester's hands were caught, and she found herself one of the ring swaying and leaping round the blaze. Cherry held her left hand and an old waterman her right. The swing of the ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... there is no piano," said Loiseau as a crowning point to the situation, "we might have finished ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... feeble, and notoriously grasping, yet the dirty, ill-smelling room which Religion entered was strewn with choicest books, sheets of music lay on the table and chairs, and several rare violins lay on a piano, whose mother-of-pearl keys glowed in ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... flying guests, littered the carpet, adding to the general confusion of overturned chairs and tables. Everywhere were evidences of the haste with which the place had been vacated as well as the superstitious dread which had prevented it being re-entered for the commonplace purpose of cleaning. Even the piano had not been shut, and under it lay some scattered sheets of music which had been left where they fell, to the probable loss of some poor musician. The clock occupying the center of the mantelpiece alone gave evidence of life. It had been wound for ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... glass globes to keep them from the moths and the draft that, of a warm evening, blew in through handsome mahogany doors; the good bright silver; the portraits by Copley and Gilbert Stuart; a young girl at a square piano, singing Moore's melodies—and Mr. Pinckney or Commodore Perry, perhaps, dropping in for a ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... roses and sweet-peas, cut by Christine—her fairy daughter—lay ready to hand. Between them they filled the lofty room with fragrance and harmonies of delicate colour. Then Christine flew to her beloved piano; and Lilamani wandered away to her no less beloved rose-garden. Body and mind were restless. She could settle to nothing till she knew what had passed between Nevil and Roy. His boyish confidences and adorations of the night ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... over it. "The strangest thing that happened," said Mistawasis, "was in Ottawa, where some good people had a missionary meeting at a house, and they were singing songs, and a lady played on the singing machine (piano). At last they asked me and Star Blanket to sing. We both were ashamed, because we could not sing much. But I told Star Blanket I would sing what the missionary taught us out on the plains and I began, and all of a sudden ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... fiddler, next a Cabinet Minister, lastly, a successful artist, hints (if required) for scenes on the Continent, in Parliament, and the Royal Academy. Wife and children. Domestic scene—good for two-thirds. Wife playing piano as the children spin their tops, or gambol with Collie dog. There now, I think I have got enough material for the present. And here we are at Bolingbroke Square, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Dec. 20, 1890 • Various
... were of tiered logs, the bark still on, and the chinking between the logs, plainly visible, was arctic moss. Through the open door that led to the dance-room came the rollicking strains of a Virginia reel, played by a piano and a fiddle. The drawing of Chinese lottery had just taken place, and the luckiest player, having cashed at the scales, was drinking up his winnings with half a dozen cronies. The faro- and roulette-tables ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... water from the well; and as all the rooms open into the court, you can see the white-capped cook over the furnace in the kitchen, and some idle painter, who has stored his canvases and washed his brushes, jangling a waltz on the crazy, tongue-tied piano in the salle-a-manger. "Edmond, encore un vermouth," cries a man in velveteen, adding in a tone of apologetic after-thought, "un double, s'il vous plait." "Where are you working?" asks one in pure white linen from top to toe. "At the Garrefour ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... put the whole thing out of her mind she tried to read, but was unable to keep her thoughts from wandering. She sat down at the piano, but music failed to interest or soothe her. She mussed over some unanswered notes in her desk but could not summon up enough concentration of mind to answer them. Restless and fidgety, unable to keep her thoughts from the unusual occurrences that had disturbed her ordinarily too peaceful ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston
... the ladies, and staring them out of countenance to magnetise them by the eye! All this time the most rigorous silence was maintained, with the exception of a few wild notes on the harmonica or the piano-forte, or the melodious voice of a hidden opera-singer swelling softly at long intervals. Gradually the cheeks of the ladies began to glow, their imaginations to become inflamed; and off they went, one after the other, in convulsive fits. Some of them sobbed and tore their hair, others laughed ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... letter from his sister telling of young Arthur's infatuation for the cheap actress, Miss Fotheringay, the story carries one along in the leisurely way of the last century. All the people are a delight, from Captain Costigan to Fowker, and from the French chef, who went to the piano for stimulus in his culinary work, to Blanche Amory and her amazing French affectations. ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... and passed through a good-sized room which looked like a second-hand bookshop. Books overflowed the shelves, and lay in piles in every available corner,—the floor, the table, the old upright piano, the very chairs, were covered with dusty volumes. Out of this room led the kitchen, which at least looked clean. A rosy little maid was leaving after the day's work ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... gave Henry up as being not quite all there, and anyhow a bloodless kind of creature, who took very little notice of her. So she went indoors and played the piano. ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... she heard the door of the drawing-room open, and the rustle of feminine garments betokened the entrance of one of her friends. Presently soft ripples of music fell upon her ear, and she knew that it was Claire who was now at the piano, playing dreamily, softly, as if half fearful of awakening ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... He is charming. One cannot bear it. To have the five-finger exercises of his irresistibility played on one. To be the stiff piano on which he practises but never plays. It is too much. And one remembers the days when one was the concert grand. Pouf. It is ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... little room looking towards the sea; there was a good strong table with a black oil-cloth cover and four hair-seated chairs, such as were much used at that time. But there were two or three pretty pictures on the walls, and a cottage piano, and in the bookcase were a few bright-coloured tempting volumes as well as the graver-looking school-books. Everything was very neat, and there was a bright fire burning, and in a pot on the window-sill ...
— The Rectory Children • Mrs Molesworth
... illustrating a proposition in Euclid, should we really be satisfied with the statement that it represented the random pencil-strokes made by a blindfolded child ignorant of geometry? On the other hand, if a fretful baby is allowed to divert himself by hammering the piano keys, is the result ever remotely akin to a tune? We know perfectly well that we never get harmony, order, beauty, rationality by accident; and there is only one other alternative—design, purpose, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... duty again, in the soothing delight of finding himself, once more free, in all but heart, in the company of Ghita. In this manner the yawl moved ahead, though with materially diminished speed, until, by the formation of the heights, and the appearance of the lamps and candles on the piano, Ghita knew that they were drawing quite near to the indentation of the coast on which is situated the town ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... chairs and lounges were deep and comfortable. A large davenport stood before the fireplace, which had been rebuilt for logs. There was a victrola in one corner, for Miss Dwight was amenable if her guests were seized with the desire to jazz, and a grand piano stood near the lower windows. The only evidence of sheer femininity was a tea table furnished with old pieces of silver she had picked up in France. The dining-room below was a trifle gayer in effect; the walls and curtains were a deep yellow and there ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... with bitterness. She was too wise to argue the point with Aunt Phoebe, and resolved to depend on Nyoda to show her the way. She dried her tears and went down to the living room and began to play softly on the piano. It had been her mother's piano, the wedding gift of her father, and it seemed that her mother's spirit hovered over it. It was the first time she had touched the keys since that awful Wednesday when the world had been turned into chaos; ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... stateroom is a state room. He has a piano in there and a photograph of President Roosevelt; and right next door he has a private bath-room with a bath-tub in it. The bath-tub is chock-full of impedimenta of a much solider quality than water, but it is to be cleared out pretty soon, and every morning ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... effort, her cloak still hanging from her shoulders, flung herself into a deep armchair, sideways, her face half buried in a cushion. The good brother appeared silently before her with a glass of water. She motioned it away. He drank it himself and walked off to a distant corner—behind the grand piano, somewhere. All was still in this room where I had seen, for the first time, Sevrin, the anti-anarchist, captivated and spellbound by the consummate and hereditary grimaces that in a certain sphere of life take the place of feelings with an excellent effect. I suppose her ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains which he himself could never ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... pursuit, esteemed himself to have reached entire perfection in the matter of killing otters. Various individuals have probably developed the power of turning somersets, of picking pockets, of playing on the piano, jew's-harp, banjo, and penny trumpet, of mental calculation in arithmetic, of insinuating evil about their neighbors without directly asserting anything, to a measure as great as is possible to man. Long practice and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... finer stroke than her reputation had led me to expect. She received me in a shabby little sitting-room littered with uncut books and newspapers, many of which I saw at a glance were French. One side of it was occupied by an open piano, surmounted by a jar full of white roses. They perfumed the air; they seemed to me to exhale the pure aroma of Pickering's devotion. Buried in an arm-chair, the object of this devotion was reading the Revue des Deux Mondes. The purpose of my visit was not to admire Madame ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... power, or merely for enjoyment; practise is systematic exercise with a view to the acquirement of facility and skill in some pursuit; a person takes a walk for exercise, or takes time for practise on the piano. Practise is also used of putting into action and effect what one has learned or holds as a theory; as, the practise of law or medicine; a profession of religion is good, but the practise of it is better. Drill is systematic, rigorous, and commonly enforced practise under ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... womanly act, else blocked the yawning hole in his prognathic head with a flat-car load of compost. If Mrs. Davis is permitted to petition the King of Kings to have mercy on the miserable journalistic piano-pounder for Gotham's high-toned honk-a-tonks, certainly she may with propriety appeal to the substitute sovereign of a nation of bankrupt assassins to ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... she said, and began to pace about the room, up and down, up and down. Her mother watched her anxiously. Angelica closed the piano. Dr. Galbraith and the bishop came in from the dining room, and then Edith declared that driving in the open air had made her so sleepy she ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Yes, I've got a case; Her voice is such a sweet soprano; Her people come from Northern Thrace; You ought to hear her play piano. If she would like my suicide— If she'd want me a dead and dumb thing, Me for a glass of cyanide, ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... lead, and suddenly coming over a ridge above a steep ice-fall, I caught sight of the Mackellar Islets and the old "Piano" berg. Just at the same instant the spur of ice on which I was standing collapsed, and down I went into a crevasse. The others quickly had me out, and, as soon as I was in the upper air, I gave them the news: "There are the Islands!" Being ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... and away starts Chubby to the drawing-room followed by the others. 'Now, ladies and gentlemen,' he begins having opened the piano, 'I give you fair warning that every one of you will have to contribute ...
— Lippa • Beatrice Egerton
... General and Mrs. Toombs celebrated their golden wedding, surrounded by their grandchildren and friends. It was a beautiful sight to see the bride of half a century with a new wedding ring upon her finger, playing the piano, while the old man of seventy essayed, like Washington, to dance the minuet. The old couple survived their three children, and lived to bless the lives of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They were fond and ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... Herr Gluck, a piano manufacturer of Munich, was a follower of Horace Fletcher, the American munching missionary. Unlike the Swiss, who craved raw food, Herr Gluck ate everything, but each mouthful only after thorough maceration, salivation, and slow deglutition. At breakfast he absorbed a glass ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... his elbows on the grand piano, facing her, was devouring her with his eyes and saying in an undertone every minute: ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... down at the piano and began to play. Whether Flibbertigibbet expected a variation of a "coon dance" or an Irish jig cannot be stated with certainty, but that she was surprised is a fact; so surprised, indeed, that for full two ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... when the secretary has computed the rate, if you listen closely you can almost hear the buzz of multiplications and additions which is going on in each man's head as he calculates exactly how much the addition will mean to him in taxes on his farm, his daughter's piano his wife's top-buggy. ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... some other fact or event, modifying or throwing light upon the principal matter without affecting its essential character; an accompaniment is something that unites with the principal matter, tho not necessary to it; as, the piano accompaniment to a song; a concomitant goes with a thing in natural connection, but in a subordinate capacity, or perhaps in contrast; as, cheerfulness is a concomitant of virtue. A circumstance ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... from the way in which he spoke that McNeice did not like bishops; but I was not prepared for the violence of the speech which he made to me after dinner. Marion and Power were at the piano, which stands in a far-off corner of my rather oversized drawing-room. McNeice settled himself in front of the fire, his long legs straddled far apart, the bow of his white tie twisted under his ear. He is a man of singularly ferocious appearance. He has very bushy eyebrows which meet ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... square and substantial, with high ceilings. It was paneled with walnut and furnished in walnut, in those days. Its tables and bureaus were of walnut, with cold white marble tops. And in the parlor was a square walnut piano, which Elinor hated because she had to sit there three hours each day, slipping on the top of the horsehair-covered stool, to practice. In cold weather her German governess sat in the frigid room, with a shawl and mittens, waiting until the onyx clock on the mantel-piece showed that ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... near a large house belonging to a Mr. Atkinson, a man of prominence in the region. The mansion had a Grecian portico with large columns the whole height of the building. Part of the furniture and the carpets had been removed, but evidences of refinement and intelligence were seen in the piano and the library with its books. With my staff I rested and ate my lunch in the spacious portico, and moving on when the halt was over, I had hardly ridden half a mile when a pillar of white smoke showed that ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox |
