"Spinning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... strong for a girl, but against this steely strength that held her she was helpless. And for a time the sense of her helplessness and the pain that any resistance to the arm wrapped round her gave her made her lie quiet. She felt the Arab check his horse, felt the chestnut wheel, spinning high on his hind legs, and ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... chances are against the bodies striking together centrally, it being very much more likely that they will hit each other rather towards the side. The nebulous mass formed as a result of the disintegration of the bodies through their furious impact would thus come into being with a spinning movement, and a spiral would ensue. Again, the stars may not actually collide, but merely approach near to each other. If very close, the interaction of gravitation will give rise to intense strains, or tides, which will entirely ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... passed over our heads at no great height. The noise of their engines made everybody look up. They were flying north. And I felt a desire to rush upwards and overtake one of them and take my seat close to the pilot, behind the propeller which was spinning round and sending the wind of its giddy speed into his face. I longed to be able to lift myself into the air above the battlefields, and there, suspended in space, try to make out the ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... the men go to bed early, they make up for it by rising early too; and if they are sleepy at night, they feel delightfully fresh in the morning. A brisk walk over the common sends the human barometer spinning upwards; they feel ready for any fun that comes in their way. And, alas! did not this same buoyancy of spirit not many years ago involve certain respectable oarsmen in a difference with the executive? ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... his top-floor back, spinning by rushlight his web of beauty, was greater than the finest critical intelligence that ever lived. The one, for all his poor technique, was stammering over something God had whispered to him, the other merely destroying thoughts ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... Dame Ursula was sitting in her cottage spinning and thinking sadly of her child's untimely death, when a forester stopped at the farm ...
— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman
... he cried in a triumphant tone, as with one foot he sent spinning across the room the chair beside which he had halted. His breast was heaving and his breath coming hard as he looked this way and that with wild eyes. Throwing open a window he put out his head and caught the cold air upon his streaming face. The sky was ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... prompt to put the worst construction on every hope of the Union, prophesies endless guerilla warfare,—a possibility which, like the blocking up of Charleston harbor by means of the stone fleet, is, of course, something which calls for the instant interference of all cotton-spinning Christian nations. Even among our own countrymen it must be confessed there has been no little indecision as to the end and the means of securing the conquest of a country whose outlines are counted ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... went, to a corner, where a big apartment house stood close to the sidewalk. There the pavement was smooth, just the place for spinning tops. ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Aunt Jo's • Laura Lee Hope
... cowardice and want of spirit, and they sent them their distaffs as presents. "We have no longer any use for the distaffs," said they, "but, as you are intending to stay at home and make women of yourselves, we send them to you, so that you may occupy yourselves with spinning while we are gone." By such taunts and ridicule as this, a great many were shamed into joining the expedition, whose good sense made them extremely averse to have any thing to ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... factory at six in the morning. He mastered Virgil and Horace in this way, and read extensively, besides studying botany. So eager and thirsty for knowledge was he, that he would place his book before him on the spinning-jenny, and amid the deafening roar of machinery would ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... drawing, engraving, casting, painting, statuary, and sculpture; for the improvement of manufactures and machines, in the various articles of hats, crapes, druggets, mills, marbled-paper, ship-blocks, spinning-wheels, toys, yarn, knitting, and weaving. They likewise allotted sums for the advantage of the British colonies in America, and bestowed premiums on those settlers who should excel in curing cochineal, planting logwood-trees, cultivating olive-trees, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... his hind legs, and towered to a height of eight feet, if not more, her heart failed her. Nevertheless, she made a gallant thrust, which might have at least incommoded the animal had not the spear received a blow which not only sent it spinning out of the woman's hand, but hurled poor Kabelaw herself on the ice, a small lump of which cut open her temple, and rendered her for the moment insensible. At the same instant the wizard took prompt advantage of his opportunity, and delivered what ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... contend with. By a reaction, very easy to be understood, it was now D'Harmental who was calm, and Roquefinette who was excited. Every instant he menaced D'Harmental with his long sword, but the frail rapier followed it as iron follows the loadstone, twisting and spinning round it like a viper. At the end of about five minutes the chevalier had not made a single lunge, but he had parried all those of his adversary. At last, on a more rapid thrust than the others, he came too late to the parry, and felt the point of his adversary's ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... hatchel; Dorothy, sighing, sinks down to rest, Forgetful of patches, sage, and satchel. Ghosts of faces peer from the gloom Of the chimney, where with swifts and reel, And the long-disused, dismantled loom, Stands the old-fashioned spinning-wheel. ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... pointed toward terra firma instead of the other way, and has an auger fixed in place at the nose. It is about twenty feet long and four feet wide and made out of the strongest metal known to modern science, cryptoplutonite. It won't heat up or break off and it will start spinning around as soon as we cut loose with the ...
— Operation Earthworm • Joe Archibald
... determined citizenship in every observation—the extension of the electric tramway, the pulling down of the old Fire Hall. In one consciousness Lorne made concise and relevant remarks; in another he sat in a spinning dark world and waited for ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... to the shore: Dr. Johnson laughed to hear that Cromwell's soldiers taught the Aberdeen people to make shoes and stockings, and to plant cabbages[265]. He asked, if weaving the plaids[266] was ever a domestick art in the Highlands, like spinning or knitting. They could not inform him here. But he conjectured probably, that where people lived so remote from each other, it was likely to be a domestick art; as we see it was among the ancients, from Penelope. I was sensible to-day, to an extraordinary degree, of Dr. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... Fahrenheit, and in that condition shoved their way up somewhere or other through these slates. But where? whence on earth did these Syenite pebbles come? Let us walk round to the cliff on the opposite side and see. It is worth while; for even if my guess be wrong, there is good spinning with a brass minnow round the angles of ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... strange and weird as this. It was all utterly irregular, of course, but people after all had a right to demand what they paid for. Enid watched the demure young man in black down the corridor, and then everything seemed to be enveloped in a dense purple mist, the world was spinning under her feet, there was a great noise like the rush of mighty waters in her brain. With a great effort she threw off the weakness and came to herself, trembling from head ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... speaking to a native, who was gesticulating very emphatically, and pointing up the river. The roar was deafening, and the sight terrific. Where there were two shallow streams a week ago, with a house and good-sized piece of ground above their confluence, there was now one spinning, rushing, chafing, foaming river, twice as wide as the Clyde at Glasgow, the land was submerged, and, if I remember correctly, the house only stood above the flood. And, most fearful to look upon, the ocean, in three huge breakers, had come quite in, and its mountains of ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... Advancement of Learning is another of Bacon's great works. The title aptly expresses the purpose of the took. He insists on the necessity of close observation of nature and of making experiments with various forms of matter. He decries the habit of spinning things out of one's inner consciousness, without patiently studying the outside world to see whether the facts justify the conclusions. In other words, he insists on induction. Bacon was not the father ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... clutched for a moment at the tablecloth. The room was suddenly spinning round and round, the faces of the people were shrouded in mist, his newly-acquired strength was all engrossed in a desperate struggle against that sickening sensation of fainting. Rice's voice seemed to come to him from a ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... midst of much hilarity many games are played; there are bobbing and ducking for apples, spinning the plate, post-office, heavy, heavy, what hangs over and forfeits. These were some of the old-fashioned ways the boys and girls of ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson
... allowed these things in time of danger. On this Abishai vaults on David's horse, and (with an Oriental metaphor) the land of the Philistines leaped to him instantly! Arrived at Ishbi's house, he beholds his mother Orpa spinning. Perceiving the Israelite, she snatched up her spinning-wheel and threw it at him, to kill him; but not hitting him, she desired him to bring the spinning-wheel to her. He did not do this exactly, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... grow in great abundance, it is to be wished that plantations of it were formed. The Catalonian monks are well fitted to spread this kind of cultivation; they are more economical, industrious, and active than the other missionaries. They have already established tan-yards and cotton-spinning in a few villages; and if they suffer the Indians henceforth to enjoy the fruit of their labours, they will find great resources in the native population. Concentered on a small space of land, these monks have the consciousness of their political importance, and have from time to time resisted ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... legs of the lady with the noble nose by a kind of miracle, hit and glanced off the wheel of the perambulator, and went spinning into ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... old churchyard, and the jougs—an iron collar in which offenders were pilloried—fastened to the porch of the church, bring back the long-forgotten past. Many changes have taken place during the last fifty years. Pendicles have been swept into large farms; the industry of weaving and spinning has disappeared. But the natural aspect of Monzie is unchanged: the Almond and the Shaggie still run sunny and clear from the everlasting hills through her silent vales, which look upon the lover of nature with a face of beauty as fresh and ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... writers of those endless newspaper articles on the degeneracy of modern women really wish to make good their case, they had better abandon their foolish complaints as to women's inability to manage the spinning-wheel or preserve pickles, and other tasks which the progress of machinery have rendered unnecessary. Let them instead turn their attention for proof of degeneracy to the strange helplessness of middle-class mothers ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers who brought bargains to the door on sunny ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... and the spinning coin decreed that Tom and Dick should do the trolling, while Bert remained on shore and tried ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... road from here to the firing-line is a great experience. You see, as you pass along, all the multifarious items of army organisation—long lines of lorries, horsed-wagons, limbers, guns, columns of marching men, motor-cars by the score, French soldiers, British soldiers, aeroplanes spinning merrily overhead—truly a wonderful spectacle. You have no conception of the abominable state of the main roads out here. The pave road, peculiar to these parts, is always a bone-shaker at the best of times, but now, after the passage of so much heavy traffic, it is simply appalling. A ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... social occupations.[1362] She is the patroness of the cultivation of the land; in Athens, where the olive was important, it was she who bestowed this tree on the city; here she is the maiden, the genius, the divine patron of vegetation. She presided over the domestic employments of women, spinning and weaving—that is, she is the goddess of household work.[1363] As is the case with so many divine patrons of men's early simple employments, she grew with the community and became gradually a great goddess, and necessarily a patroness ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... superstitious person in a temple, tremblingly adore all he meets with; but use himself to such confidence as may enable him openly to pronounce, This was ill or incongruously said, and, That was bravely and gallantly spoken. For example, Achilles in Homer, being offended at the spinning out that war by delays, wherein he was desirous by feats of arms to purchase to himself glory, calls the soldiers together when there was an epidemical disease among them. But having himself some smattering skill in physic, and perceiving after the ninth day, which useth ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... for the flower-seller was wizened and unsteady of foot, and she had sent him spinning about in a dizzy fashion. She put out a steadying hand. "Oh . . . !" This time it was in ecstasy; she had spied the primroses in the basket just as the sunshine splashed over the edge of the corner building straight ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... bedridden father lived day after day imprisoned in the small tenement overlooking the rushing, hurrying world of which she was no part. Each morning Louise, Hal's younger sister, made tidy the house, packed up a luncheon, and the two started for Davis and Coulter's spinning mills where all day they helped to operate the busy machinery. It was a noisy, monotonous occupation; a stretch of dull, wearisome hours, and frequently the boy and girl were so tired at night they had scarcely energy to move. And yet they toiled at the humdrum task gratefully, ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... The Captain seemed to fire the same instant, but Billy had jumped aside as he shot his own gun and he heard the bullet singing past his ear, and now, with his revolver out of his pocket, he shot again with an aim so true that the other man's right hand gave a spasmodic jerk and the revolver went spinning to the ground. ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... Tour and her friend were employed from the morning till the evening in spinning cotton for the use of their families. Destitute of all those things which their own industry could not supply, they walked about their habitations with their feet bare, and shoes were a convenience reserved for Sunday, when, at an early ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... shown by his excellency this asylum (Hospicio they call it) where there appeared in every countenance the utmost cheerfulness and content. The decency and neatness of the dress of the young females, with the order in which they were arranged at their spinning-wheels and looms in an extensive airy apartment, was admirable. A governess inspected and regulated all their works, which were the manufacturing of ribbons of all colours, coarse linens, and tapes; all which were managed and brought to perfection by ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... medicine-cabinet, with a mental note that some day he must remove the fifty or sixty other blades that were also temporarily, piled up there. He finished his shaving in a growing testiness increased by his spinning headache and by the emptiness in his stomach. When he was done, his round face smooth and streamy and his eyes stinging from soapy water, he reached for a towel. The family towels were wet, wet and clammy and vile, all of them wet, he found, as he blindly ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... not had leisure to keep them in steady exercise, so that at first they were very skittish, and prone to break; but they soon settled down to their work, and then did not pull an ounce too much for pleasure, even when spinning along at top-speed, with their small lean heads thrust eagerly forward, after the fashion of the barbs called "Drinkers of the Wind." Once I drove, in single harness, a trotter whose time was close ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... as it was called in the village, was long remembered as one of the most interesting events that had occurred for many years. One of the chief amusements of the evening was the spinning of long yarns about the incidents of the late voyage, by men who could spin ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... form his brooding thoughts: How had she fared, spinning her history Into a psyche-cradle? With what wings Would she come forth to greet the aeonian summer? Glistening with feathery dust of silver? or Dull red, and seared with spots of black ingrained? "I know," he said, "some women fail of life! The rose hath shed her leaves: ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... episodes crowd one another out—the more one writes, the more one recalls. These random jottings, however, will call up many more to the reader's memory. Such is my hope—that, having started you in a reminiscent frame of mind you will now carry on "spinning ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... in 1806, at Valenciennes, daughter of very poor weavers, was employed, from the age of seven years, in a spinning-mill; corrupted early by her life in the work-room, she was a mother at the age of thirteen; having had to testify in the Court of Assizes against Jean-Francois Durut, she made of him a formidable enemy, and ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... days, millionaires, and multi-millionaires are exceedingly common, but not so in the time of which I write, and much astonishment was created at the sum of money which Mr. Richard Arkwright, son of Sir Richard, the inventor of the spinning jinny, left behind him. His will was proved, on 24 May, in Canterbury Prerogative Court, and his personal property was sworn to exceed 1,000,000 pounds; the stamp duty on the probate of which was 15,000 ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... friend Josiah Cheeks, the Major-General of the Horse-Marines, of his Majesty's ship the Merry Dun of Dover. I was dissatisfied with my reception by Captain Reud, of his Majesty's ship Eos, notwithstanding his skill at spinning upon a bottle; nor was I altogether satisfied with the blustering, half-protecting, half-overbearing conduct towards me, of his first-lieutenant, Mr Farmer. But all these dissatisfactions united were as nothing to the disgust I felt at the broad innuendoes ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... was close upon him; he saw that it was spinning and of a flat round shape, not a ball as he had expected, and then, while he dug in his hands and stiffened every muscle to resist the shock, he received a heavy blow on his lowered shoulder and a wet mass was flung violently into his face. He held on, however, and without ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... given to the European to equal the skill of the black on African surf beaches, and, as might be expected, the next roller that swooped in overended the canoe, and sent it spinning like a toy through the broken water. But Captain Kettle had gained some way; and if he could not paddle the little craft to sea, he could at least swim her out; and this he proceeded to do. He was as ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... crowds, the lights, the whirl of a life she could not understand, the terrors of presentation, the men suddenly brought up to her, who bowed and immediately whirled her away amongst a crowd of young people, all spinning madly round, and knowing each other probably as little as she knew her partner of the moment. It had all been strange to her, and she realized with pleasure that she should not be obliged to go through it again this year. Her mother was not a worldly woman, and had not inspired ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... another dwelling; you can watch a wreath of hearth-smoke curling up among the shoots and trails of the vines. Men are at work in their almost perpendicular patches of ground, an old woman sits tranquilly spinning under a blossoming almond tree on a crumbling mass of rock, and smiles down on the dismay of the travelers far below her feet. The cracks in the ground trouble her as little as the precarious state of the old wall, a pendant mass of loose stones, ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... her cap with a 'There! there! ha' done wi' thee,' but had no more heart to show her disapprobation; and now they came back to their usual occupations until it should please their visitor to go; then they would rake the fire and be off to bed; for neither Sylvia's spinning nor Bell's knitting was worth candle-light, and morning hours ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... to one point above the centre. In each house a hall some twenty feet by fifty, and in the hall,—what is not in the hall?—maybe a piano, maybe a fish-rod, maybe a rifle or a telescope, a volume of sermons or a volume of songs, a spinning-wheel, or a guitar, or a battledore. You might ask widely for what you needed, for study or for play, and you would find it, though it were a deep divan of Osiat or a chibouque from Stamboul—you would find it in one of these simple ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... him perfectly happy. It was at these times, I think, that my father was at his sweetest. Calm as a sky after showers, he would discuss every topic with tenderness and interest and appeared to be unupsettable; he had eternal youth, and was unaffected by a financial world which had been spinning round ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... spinning women wrought them, what painters designed these drawings, so true they are? How naturally they stand and move, like living creatures, not patterns woven. What a clever thing is man! Ah, and himself—Adonis—how beautiful ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... from Scotland; it is the most Protestant part of the island, though the Catholics predominate, and is the most enterprising and prosperous part; the land is extensively cultivated, and flax growing and spinning ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... undisturbed, was spinning out his sleep. Mrs. Greening brought coffee and refreshments for the young widow from her own kitchen across the road, and the sun rose and drove the mists out of the hollows, as a shepherd drives his flocks out ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... hymn-books with him and distributed them in the congregation with an activity and conversational freedom that made him acquainted at once. The hymns proved to be nursery rhymes of salvation set to what may be described as lightly spinning dicky-bird music. Anybody could sing them, and everybody did, and the more they sang the more cheerful they looked, but not repentant. The service was composed mostly of these songs interspersed now and then with wildly excruciating exhortations from Brother Dunn to repent and believe. ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... last bitter thought, and then he was too occupied for cerebral indulgence. For the next minutes he wielded truer than any! Men came and fell, and others leaped and fell, skulls shattered, the life-stuff spurting, before Otah's shaft went spinning away in shattered ruin; he leaped to seize another, employed it in great sweeping swaths against those who still came. Two went down, but two came to fill the gap. In perfect unison, one parried as the other ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... flung the two oarsmen sprawling and toppled Captain Hocken's tall hat over his nose. Mr Tregaskis thrust out a hand to catch it, but in too great a haste. The impact of his finger-tips on the edge of the crown sent the hat spinning forward over the thwart whereon sprawled Ben Price, the stroke oar, and into the lap ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... than all, a large airy garret, where on all rainy days and days when it looked as if it would rain, Bill, Joe, Lizzie, and I assembled to hold our noisy revels. Never, since the days of our great-grandmothers, did little spinning wheel buzz round faster than did the one which, in the darkest corner of that garret, had been safely stowed away, where they guessed "the ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... only fair that (es muy justo que) he should have a chance of mastering (aprender a fondo) the art of spinning and weaving. ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... remark of Hazlitt that "Steele seems to have gone into his closet chiefly to set down what he had observed out-of-doors;" {301} while Addison appears "to have spent most of his time in his study," spinning out to the utmost there the hints "which he borrowed from Steele or took from nature." Every one, however, will cordially say with Hazlitt, "I am far from wishing to depreciate Addison's talents, but I am anxious to do justice to Steele." There are not many ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... a delegate to the Wheeling Convention. But the war had borne hard on them, and for a long time everything which they used or wore had been made by their own hands. They had a home-made loom and spinning-wheel—I saw several such looms on the river; they raised their own cotton and wool and maple sugar, and were in all important details utterly self-sustaining and independent. And they did not ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... us for the first time and negligently broke off in his compliment; raising himself and saluting us. "Ah," he continued indolently, "two of the maidens of Caylus, I see. With an odd pair of hands apiece, unless I am mistaken, Why do you not set them spinning, Mademoiselle?" and he regarded us with that smile which—with other things ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... was open of that house; the stringed instrument was laid against it. Ay, the strings were humming still, the song was spinning round like a leaf in the cavern of it; but the black ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... his usual "Ay," Ramblin' Peter jumped up and ran to where his commander's steed was picketed. In doing so he had to pass an open space, and a ball striking his cap sent it spinning into the air; but Peter, like Black, was not easily affected by trifles. Next moment he was on the back of Will's horse—a great long-legged chestnut—and flying towards the main body ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... Waste of time. Gasballs spinning about, crossing each other, passing. Same old dingdong always. Gas: then solid: then world: then cold: then dead shell drifting around, frozen rock, like that pineapple rock. The moon. Must be a new moon out, she said. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... he could recover the stallion was away in a flash, like a racer leaving the barrier and reaching full speed in almost a stride. Not far—hardly the breadth of the street—before he pitched up in a long leap as if to clear a barrier, landed stiff-legged with a sickening jar, whirled again like a spinning top, and darted straight back. And Jerry Strann pulled leather—with might and main—but the short stirrups were against him, and above all the suddenness of the start had taken him off guard for all his readiness. When the stallion dropped stiff-legged Jerry was thrown forward and an unlucky ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... Mary She minds her dairy, While I go a-hoeing and mowing each morn. Merrily run the reel And the little spinning-wheel While I am singing and mowing ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... her release was easy. Very hastily she freed herself. She made one step from the tree, and her head was spinning. Her last conscious movement was towards him. She reeled, and dropped. Her hand fell upon his thigh. It was soft and wet, and gave way under her pressure; he cried out at her touch, and ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... the advantage I had gained with the law maxim, "Non minus ex dolo quam ex culpa quisque hac lege tenetur," which I found afterward was the wrong Latin, but it had its desired effect, so that the jury did not agree, and Carlo escaped with his life; and on the way home he went spinning round like a top, and punctuating his glee with a semicolon made by both paws on ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... those minute incidents that burn themselves into the memory of people whose nerves are on the rack. The splash of a hawser into the dock; the deep notes of the engine-room telegraph, and the clicking reply upon the bridge; the spinning of the wheel as a quartermaster tests the steering engine; the clack and spit of winches, and finally the thrilling shout of the foghorn, whose echo leaves you trembling—all these things have a painful significance, and they bite and grip into the heart. As the ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... drawers, with a small looking-glass, ornamented by a sprig of asparagus, a dresser of rough pine shelves on the right of the fireplace, and a cupboard on the left, a half-dozen chip-bottomed chairs, a spinning-wheel, and a reel and ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... able to get a fixed rope easier than that," Hjalmar said, and took one of the spares from his rucksack. He coiled it, making a running loop on one end, and standing precariously on the lip of the rapids, sent it spinning toward the outcrop of rock we had chosen as a fixed point. "If I ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... that the senoritas cared little for the gratitude of their guests. They married them from their irresistible propensity in this direction, which was as much a necessity of their constitution as web-spinning is to the spider, or singing in the woods is to the birds. Once launched in matrimony, the men and women guests lost all attraction for the Senoritas de Mere. Their attention was immediately turned to the ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... to let him have it when some one fired two shots from a revolver. The second shot hit the man in his shoulder, I think, spinning him clean around and dropping him. He was up and staggering away in a few seconds. I followed him for some little distance; then, being satisfied that he was trying to get ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders Among the Kentucky Mountaineers • Jessie Graham Flower
... corn and salt meat from Great Britain or Ireland. The population of Malta and Gozo exceeds 100,000, while the food of all kinds produced on the two islands would barely suffice for one-fourth of that number. The deficit is procured by the growth and spinning of cotton, for which corn could not be substituted from the nature of the soil, or, were it attempted, would produce but a small proportion of the quantity which the cotton raised on the same fields and spun into thread, enables the Maltese to purchase, not to mention that ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... in and were at once recognized and seated—the two boys still continuing their play about the room. "Tad" was spinning his top; and Lincoln, as we entered, had just finished adjusting the string for him so as to give the top the greatest degree of force. He remarked that he was having a ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... sitting by the peat fire, with her neglected spinning-wheel beside her. She was strikingly handsome, in spite of her mournful expression and dejected attitude. Her black hair, as yet only slightly touched with grey waved on either side of a broad ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... therefrom, and in circles concentric to each other. Each world keeps constantly in nearly the same tract round the Sun, and continues at the same time turning round itself, in nearly an upright position, as a top turns round itself when it is spinning on the ground, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... face; if, when you lounged into the opera-pit, handsome dog that you are, each spendthrift rake in 'Fop's Alley,' who now waits but the scratch of your pen to endorse billets doux with the charm that can chain to himself for a month some nymph of the Ballet, spinning round in a whirlwind of tulle, would shrink from the touch of your condescending forefinger with more dread of its contact than a bailiff's tap in the thick of Pall Mall could inspire; if, reduced to the company of city ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hand-labour in the industrial arts. The enormous increase of wealth-producing power given by the new machinery can scarcely be realized. It is reckoned that fifty men with modern machinery could do all the cotton-spinning of the whole of Lancashire a century ago. Mr. Leone Levi has calculated that to make by hand all the yarn spun in England in one year by the use of the self-acting mule, would take 100,000,000 men. The instruments which work this wonderful change are called "labour-saving" machinery. ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... Gluck's head; but at the instant, the old gentleman interposed his conical cap, on which it crashed with a shock that shook the water out of it all over the room. What was very odd, the rolling-pin no sooner touched the cap than it flew out of Schwartz's hand, spinning like a straw in a high wind, and fell into the corner at the further end of ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... with incised lines, some straight, others curved. Italian archaeologists call them FUSAIOLES, and Swiss savants, who have found a great many in the lakes of their native country, give them the name of PESONS DE FUSEAU. Both these names connect them with the process of spinning; but their number renders this hypothesis inadmissible, and when we give an account of the excavations carried on at Hissarlik, under Dr. Schliemann, we shall be able to determine their character ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... matter of course—as would make envious the old tonal weavers of the Netherlands! There is, literally, no waste ornament or filling in his scores; every theme, every subsidiary figure, is set spinning so that you dream of fireworks spouting in every direction, only the fire is vitriolic and burns the tympani of the ears. Seriously, like all complex effects, the Schoenberg scores soon become legible if scrutinised without prejudice. The ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... spinning, grew into little romances, which Silla took in with wide-open eyes, and afterwards continued ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... help weeping," whimpered Bertha, as she continued to drive her spinning-wheel, "when one thinks of all that has passed, ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... conventional pictures of its delights, that the heaven which these pious souls had painted would not do for them, for there were no seals there. There are thousands of us who, if we spoke the truth, would say the same thing, with the necessary variations arising from our environment. There is not a spinning-mill in it all. How would some of us like that? There is not a ledger, nor a theatre, no novels, no amusements. Would it not be intolerable ennui to be put down in such an order of things? You would be like the Israelites, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... thread. The use of a simple spindle, composed of a stone like a large button, with a stick run through a hole in the centre, facilitated the making of thread and the construction of rude looms. It was but a step from these to the spinning-wheels and looms of the Middle Ages. When the Spaniards discovered the Pueblo Indians, they were wearing garments of their own weaving from cotton and wood fibres. Strong cords attached to the limbs of trees and to a piece of wood on the ground formed the framework of the loom, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... impatience and hurried through the great guard-room to the winding stairs, that were cut out of the core of the massive stones. Up and across another mighty hall, and then up again, and into a great women's-room, full of looms and spinning-wheels, where a buxom English housewife and half-a-dozen red-cheeked maids were gaping over their distaffs at the tale a jolly old monk was ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... ready, and after this came the inevitable evening-quarters—and some old man-of-war's men would think the country was going to 'Jemmy Square-toes' stern first if they didn't have quarters—then down hammocks for the night at six bells, and after that just as much of fun, frolic, dance, song and yarn spinning as all hands wanted until eight bells, when the ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... seeing that you keep few, or no secrets from each other. I know'd ye both as young gentlemen, and then you loved one another like twins; and then I know'd ye as luffs, when ye'd walk the deck the whole watch, spinning yarns; and then I know'd ye as Pillardees and Arrestee, though one pillow might have answered for both; and as for Arrest, I never know'd either of ye to got into that scrape. As for telling a secret to one, I've always ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... happened to take its birth in my house, it was laid to my charge, and many a time was I obligated to tell all about it, and how it couldna be meant for me, but had been incurred by Bailie Pirlet's conceit of spinning out ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... of mathematical instruments, joynery, turnery, the making of blocks and watches, weaving, shoemaking, or any other useful trade or mystery that the school is capable of teaching; and the girls to be taught and instructed in spinning of flax and wool, and knitting of gloves and stockings, sewing and making of all sorts of useful needlework, and the making of straw-work, as hats, baskets, etc., or any other useful art or mystery that the school is ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... eyes, a myriad sparkling colours shot spinning through her brain. She stood gazing, gazing, as one beneath a spell. For the passage of many seconds there was no sound in ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... period, sounds pleasant enough at this distance of time, when the classical impression is left, and the details forgotten, or only brought to light by those who explore the few remote parts of England where the custom still lingers. The idea of the mistress and her maidens spinning at the great wheels while the master was abroad ploughing his fields, or seeing after his flocks on the purple moors, is very poetical to look back upon; but when such life actually touches on our own days, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... several cottages by the road-side, we saw the peasant girls spinning; some of them were working in silk, others in cotton. They all seemed happy, gay, and noisy; and where there were one or two of them together, seemed to interrupt their labour by playing with each other. It is impossible that a people of this kind can ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... extraordinary cases they were summoned, it was believed, to the councils of the Olympian gods; but they usually remained in their particular spheres, in secluded grottoes and peaceful valleys, occupied in spinning, weaving, bathing, singing sweet songs, dancing, sporting, or accompanying deities who passed through their territories—hunting with Artemis (Diana), rushing about with Dionysos (Bacchus), making merry with Apollo or Hermes (Mercury), but always in ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... story you're telling me, Gaylord," said Everett. They were well out into the country now, spinning along over the dusty plains of red grass, with the ragged blue outline of the mountains ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... should say it would go spinning down the valley for miles," said Manners, laughingly. "Just like a Brobdingnagian boy's hoop ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... moment the vision of Coral's hopeless suitor had faded, and Nick was once more spinning around on the wheel of his own woes. The night before, when he had sent his note to Susy, from a little restaurant close to Palazzo Vanderlyn that they often patronized, he had done so with the firm intention of going away for a day or two in order to collect his wits and think over ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... in obtaining pieces as fine as this yards long if required, or in spinning it very much finer. There is upon the screen a single line made by the small garden spider, and the size of this is perfectly evident (Fig. 7). You now see a quartz fiber far finer than this, or, rather, you see a diffraction phenomenon, for no true ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... I sell my ball, I sell my spinning-wheel and all; And I'll do all that e'er I can To follow the eyes of ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... than myself. Brought up on a farm and familiar from my earliest years with the avocations of rural life, spending the early spring-times in the maple-sugar camp, the later weeks in gardening and gathering stove-wood, the summers in picking and spinning wool, and the autumns in drying apples, I found little opportunity, and that only in winter, for books or play. My father was a generous-hearted, impulsive, talented, but uneducated man; my mother was a conscientious, self-sacrificing, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... soldier, spinning on his heels and falling on the threshold of the drawing-room, his face covered ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... succeeded in finding very much of the Gentile property that had been captured by the Saints in the various raids they made through the country. Bedding of every kind and in large quantities was found and reclaimed by the owners. Even spinning wheels, soap barrels, and other articles were recovered. Each house where stolen property was found was certain to receive a Missouri blessing from the troops. The men who had been most active in gathering plunder had fled to Illinois ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... have been built in the form of the block letter U, this form having been decided upon as giving the conditions of lowest resultant cost. One wing, two stories in height, contains weaving; the other wing, three stories in height, contains carding and spinning, while the engine is placed in the connecting building. The pickers and the boilers are in outside buildings, so placed that they will not interfere with future extensions of the building into the form of the ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... city. Neptune, with a stroke of his trident, formed a horse, but Minerva causing an olive-tree to spring from the ground, obtained from the god the prize. She was the goddess of war, wisdom, and arts, such as spinning, weaving, music, and especially of the pipe. In a word, she was patroness of all those sciences which render men useful to society and themselves, and entitle them to the esteem ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... spurt of flame, a puff of smoke and before the crack of the report snapped out the dirty, greasy hat of Paz went spinning from ...
— The Boy Ranchers Among the Indians - or, Trailing the Yaquis • Willard F. Baker
... his mystic dances. First he danced a solemn measure, Very slow in step and gesture, In and out among the pine-trees, Through the shadows and the sunshine, 100 Treading softly like a panther. Then more swiftly and still swifter, Whirling, spinning round in circles, Leaping o'er the guests assembled, Eddying round and round the wigwam, 105 Till the leaves went whirling with him, Till the dust and wind together Swept in eddies round about him. Then along the sandy ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... skaters rushed for the head of the pond. Sunny Boy felt his hand pulled from Grandpa Horton's and he spun around like a little top. When he stopped spinning he landed on his hands and knees and several boys almost skated into him. Grandpa Horton was ...
— Sunny Boy and His Playmates • Ramy Allison White
... Robinson, too, is now home; returned, 1748 (Treaty of Aix in his pocket); and an Excellency Keith, more and more famous henceforth, has succeeded him in that Austrian post. Busy people, these and others; now legationing in Foreign parts: able in their way; but whose work proved to be that of spinning ropes from sand, and must not detain us ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... a farm, a very goodly farm for so hilly a district. It lay, a fertile flat, in a notch of the green hillside. When he reached the house yard he asked for Mistress Betty M'Leod, and was led to her presence. The old dame sat at her spinning-wheel in a farm kitchen. Her white hair was drawn closely, like a thin veil, down the sides of her head and pinned at the back. Her features were small, her eyes bright; she was not unlike a squirrel in her sharp little movements and quick glances. ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... other's successes now the more ignominious would be his downfall. The free baron had not hesitated to use any means to obliterate his one foeman from the scene; and he repeated to himself that he would meet force with cunning, and duplicity with stealth, spinning such a web as lay within his own capacity and resources. But in estimating the moves before him, perhaps in his new-found trust, he overlooked the strongest menace to his success—a ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... agility of a cat, and struck his arm a violent blow. His purpose was to knock the revolver out of the captain's hand, so that he and his friends could secure the use of it. But he overdid the matter, for the revolver went spinning out of the captain's hand and dropped into the water, where it sank out of sight. Startled and shocked, he straightened up without giving the signal to Abe ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... on, spinning his silver dollar in leisurely fashion on the smooth counter, "how am I going to get up to the mines today after I look around here for Barb—where can I get ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... soon as I began making airships, and so I devised what I call a gyroscope equilibrizer or stabilizer. A gyroscope, you know, is a heavy wheel, spinning at enormous speed, on an anti-friction axle. Its great speed tends to keep it in stable equilibrium, and, if displaced by outside forces, it will return to its ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... no faggot for burning, Allen-a-Dale has no furrow for turning, Allen-a-Dale has no fleece for the spinning, Yet Allen-a-Dale has red gold for the winning; Come, read me my riddle! come, hearken my tale! And tell me ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... attacked. Of course, they could not protect themselves by a counter-fire, but when a man is born in Scotland, and is a direct descendant of oatmeal-eating bandits, he naturally has a keener brain than even the Jews can boast of; consequently, by spinning nose dives and other signs of lack of control the wily Scot gleefully gained the enemy's side of the lines. Here he was unmolested, although Hun aviators must have been astonished to see one of their own machines engaged in the ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... months?" "Certainly, nothing that I can think of," was the reply of my sister, whose scepticism, in fact, had not settled upon the five months, but altogether upon the five minutes. The apparatus for spinning him, however, perhaps from its complexity, would not work—a fact evidently owing to the stupidity of the gardener. On reconsidering the subject, he announced, to the disappointment of some amongst us, that, although the physical discovery was now complete, he saw a moral difficulty. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... little boy thought better of it, and, after a moment's hesitation, climbed into the clock and took his seat upon the other cake. It was as warm and springy, and smelt as deliciously, as a morning in May. Then there was a whizzing sound, like a lot of wheels spinning around, and the clock rose from the floor and made a great swoop toward ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... are spent in the getting, Since women for tea[415-4] forsook spinning and knitting, And men for punch forsook ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... to redress fancied wrongs, and even take the ship out of the hands of the principal. He could think of nothing but this brilliant enterprise; and while his shipmates were talking of the future, and indulging in the old salts' vocation of "spinning yarns," he was busy maturing the details of "The Chain League." He did not, for reasons best known to himself attempt to make any ...
— Outward Bound - Or, Young America Afloat • Oliver Optic
... miles above Earth's surface the great space platform sped from daylight into darkness. Once every two hours it circled the earth completely, spinning along through space like a mighty wheel of steel ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin |
