"Teetotum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unexpectedly, he would leap three times in the air, and then gather himself in a corner for a fearsome spring. When he wept he seemed to be laughing, and he laughed in a paroxysm of tears. He tried to tear the devil out of the pulpit rails. When he was not a teetotum he was a windmill. His pump position was the most appalling. Then he glared motionless at his admiring listeners, as if he had fallen into a trance with his arm upraised. The hurricane broke next moment. Nanny Sutie bore ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... where did you get this teetotum? We might sell her for a mechanical top—warranted perpetual motion. When the legs give out, ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... everybody is in the boat it is shot out into the water like an arrow from a bow, and brought head around, like a teetotum. Then, with the four oars in the hands of four men who work them with strength and will, it goes gliding, ay, fairly bounding, ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... emphatically (and he had never heard of Shakespeare), 'you might give me all your kingdom for my horse; I wouldn't take it!' He uttered these words, chuckled, drew Malek-Adel up on to his haunches, turned him in the air on his hind legs like a top or teetotum, and off! He went like a flash over the stubble. And the hunting man (a rich prince, they said he was) flung his cap on the ground, threw himself down with his face in his cap, and lay so ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... Madamsall Fanny, coming forward, stood on the tips of only five of her toes, and raising up the other five, and the foot belonging to them, almost to her shoulder, twirled round, and round, and round, like a teetotum, for a couple of minutes or more; and as she settled down, at last, on both feet, in a natural decent posture, you should have heard how the house roared with applause, the boxes clapping with all their might, and waving their handkerchiefs; the pit shouting, "Bravo!" Some ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... whole week. With the exception of that little pint of amari aliquid at Rotterdam, we were all very happy. We might have gone on being happy for whoever knows how many days more? a week more, ten days more: who knows how long that dear teetotum happiness can be made ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray |
