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More "Fiddler" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and sawed away on "Honest John," "The Devil's Dream," "Haste to the Wedding," and "The Fisher's Hornpipe." He lost all sense of being a millionnaire, and returned to his simple, unsophisticated self. The others cheered him because he had gold. I cheered him because he was a good old "corduroy fiddler." ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... the merry," says William Butler Yeats, Ireland's foremost living poet, in "The Fiddler of Dorney." This is an old truth, too often ignored or forgotten. There are, unhappily, many persons who have conceived the strange notion that goodness means a gloomy outlook toward the world and those who inhabit it. To them this earth is a vale of tears; everything is evil and steadily growing ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... he could afford to despise pedantry: did he meet a traveller who amused his fancy he would give him the pass-word ('the fiddler's paid,' or what not), as though the highway had not its code of morals; nor did he scruple, when it served his purpose, to rob the bunglers of his own profession. By this means, indeed, he raised the standard of the Road and warned the incompetent to embrace ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... in from somewhere at the back, a big blooming girl by the name of Sadie, and a small red-head, tragically faded, with soft brown eyes that should never have looked upon Bullard's. Two men rose and took them as the tune, an old-fashioned waltz, began to ripple under the fingers of the fiddler, who was a born musician, and the four swung down between the tables and the bar. The Golden Cloud was in full swing, running free for the night, though the soft twilight was scarcely faded from the beautiful ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... the city, and was beheld of everybody there with great admiration; for the people of Paris are so sottish, so badot, so foolish and fond by nature, that a juggler, a carrier of indulgences, a sumpter-horse, or mule with cymbals or tinkling bells, a blind fiddler in the middle of a cross lane, shall draw a greater confluence of people together than an evangelical preacher. And they pressed so hard upon him that he was constrained to rest himself upon the towers of Our Lady's Church. At which place, seeing so many about him, he said with a ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... gave him to understand, that he had been ruined by his wife, who, having robbed him of all his cash and valuable effects, had eloped from his house with one of his own customers, who appeared in the character of a French count, but was in reality no other than an Italian fiddler; that, in consequence of this retreat, he, the husband, was disabled from paying a considerable sum which he had set apart for his wine merchant, who being disappointed in his expectation, took out an execution against his effects; and the rest of his creditors following his example, hunted ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... by a warm fire and a bright red light and sewed or read. Ramonti found the atmosphere so agreeable that he spent much time there, describing to Mrs. Barry the wonders of Paris, where he had studied with a particularly notorious and noisy fiddler. ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... find a crab or two, perhaps, some jelly-fish, star-fish, and those wonderful living flowers, the sea-anemones. And then we will watch the great gulls sweeping about in the air, and if we are lucky, we may see an army of little fiddler-crabs marching along, each one with one claw in the air. We may gather sea-side diamonds; we may, perhaps, go in and bathe, and who can tell everything that we may do on the shores of the grand ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... back—had been a scene, for our young woman, of supreme brilliancy; a party given at a "gallery" hired by a hostess who fished with big nets. A Spanish dancer, understood to be at that moment the delight of the town, an American reciter, the joy of a kindred people, an Hungarian fiddler, the wonder of the world at large—in the name of these and other attractions the company in which, by a rare privilege, Kate found herself had been freely convoked. She lived under her mother's roof, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... orders by sun-up. The last cabin he visited was that of Pat Kavanagh. Kavanagh was a man of parts, and had been a close friend of the old skipper. He was a man of the world, having sailed deep-sea voyages in his youth. He was a grand fiddler, a grand singer, and had made more "Come-all-ye's" than you could count on your fingers and toes. He had a wooden leg; and his daughter was the finest girl in Chance Along. His best known Come-all-ye, which is sung to this day from Caplin Arm to ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... it had been lavished upon him. He had plenty of pets and toys, went to dancing school, in which his natural love of dancing made him delight, and was given stiff but merry little parties, at which old Cy, the black fiddler played and called the figures, and the little host and his friends conformed to the strict, ceremonious etiquette observed by the children as well as the grown people of ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... filled with traders, troopers, trappers and squaws. No buck ever participated in a white man's dance, but several stood by the door and looked on. Every one was in high spirits, and when the fiddler, a French 'breed, struck up, stamping his moccasined feet to keep time, each man secured a squaw and took his place. A brazen-lunged 'breed shouted, "Alleman' lef'! Swing yer partners!" and ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... it in defeat—that being the test of victory. At last, the girl from Dryhill reeled, and was caught by half-a-dozen arms. Her adversary, holding the floor undisputed, slowed down, and someone stopped the fiddler. Sally turned from the crowded wall, and began looking about for Samson. He was not there. Lescott had seen him leave the house a few moments before, and started over to intercept the girl, as she ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... good fiddler. The white folks have taught me to do lots of different things. I have had very few advantages and I ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves, North Carolina Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... sleeping, page and fiddler, Cook, scullion, free from care; Only Robin's Stallions from their stables Neighed ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... if she could not have ballrooms of gray and rose and crystal, she wanted to be swinging across a puncheon-floor with a dancing fiddler. This smug in-between town, which had exchanged "Money Musk" for phonographs grinding out ragtime, it was neither the heroic old nor the sophisticated new. Couldn't she somehow, some yet unimagined how, turn it back ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... inn, love, and the lights and the fire, And the fiddler's old tune and the shuffling of feet; For there in a while shall be rest and desire, And there shall the morrow's ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... stand at the door, A fiddler and singers three, And one with a bright lamp thrusts at the dark, And ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... day before, from ile to ile,—for these descendants of a maritime race call their homestead groves islands,—to tell where the ball was to be, he would assert, if there was even a hope of it, that 'Thanase was to be the fiddler. ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... accrue to you from such conduct as yours? One moment you tell me you are going to become the greatest musician in the world, and straight you fill my house with fiddlers. Tri. I am clear out of that scrape now, sir. Old F. Then from a fiddler you are metamorphosed into a philosopher; and for the noise of drums, trumpets, and hautboys, you substitute a vile jargon, more unintelligible than was ever heard at the tower of Babel. Tri. You are right, sir, I have found out ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... maun gang back there again, for we can mak' nocht o' ye here." But Mr. Jeffrey got back his own. For, before the same judge, happening to speak of an "itinerant violinist," Lord Newton inquired: "D'ye mean a blin' fiddler?"—"Vulgarly so called, my lord," ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... heart, miss, that's nothin'. By the cut of his jib I'd rate him as a fiddler, an' I remember once, at Brindisi, I was pointed out two counts an' a ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... superbly well. And for diversion went farther into the woods to hear a fiddler and to have him teach me the art which fled my dull fingers and the unwieldy bow. And this fiddler! His curly hair, always wet from his lustrations for the evening meal; his cud of tobacco; his racy locutions; his happy and contented spirit; and his merry ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... Richard Fitzsimmons, too, was found, The Paganini of sweet sound In days gone by, with memories big, And well he danced an Irish jig. Most incomplete would be my tale, Did I not draw aside the veil, And bring from distant vistas through, The ancient fiddler into view. While strolling downward by the locks, One of those reminiscent knocks I felt, which brought my eye before Another of the men of yore; I gazed, as the dim shadow neared, And then before my ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... as may be gathered from his Short Study on the Templars. In Devonshire he frequented an old-fashioned church where stringed instruments were still played, and was much delighted with the remark of a fiddler which he overheard. "Who is the King of glory?" had been given out as the anthem. While the fiddles were tuning up a voice was heard to say: "Hand us up the rosin, Tom; us'it soon tell them who's the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... promptness and coolness. Having gone straightway to his brother to notify him of the discovery and to urge him to instant flight, he contrived to disappear. A few days later a chest of merchandise was brought to the house of a certain citizen of Rotterdam, who had once been a fiddler, but was now a man of considerable property. The chest, when opened, was found to contain the Seigneur de Stoutenburg, who in past times had laid the fiddler under obligations, and in whose house he now lay ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... wus a fiddler, an' he sometimes played fer de dances at de Cross Roads, a little village near de marster's place. All what ain't been mean could go, but de mean ones can't, an' de rest o' us has ter habe a pass ter keep de ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... wuddy worthies he fell in with his ancient adversary Winterton, who, instead of harbouring any resentment for the trick he played him in the Lord Boyd's castle, was rejoiced to see him again: he himself was then in the service of David Rizzio, the fiddler, whom the Queen some short time before had taken ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... not? where was your sight, OEdipus? you walk with hare's eyes, do you? I'll have them glazed, rogue; an you say the word, they shall be glazed for you: come we must have you turn fiddler again, slave, get a base viol at your back, and march in a tawny coat, with one sleeve, to Goose-fair; then you'll know us, you'll see us then, you will, gulch, you will. Then, Will't please your worship to ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... curate was very old, and nothing seemed alive but the fiddles in the gallery—indeed, after the "Penny Magazine" had made us acquainted with the Nibelung, Jaquey took to calling Sisson, Folker the mighty fiddler, so ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fools of fate and slaves of circumstance, Life is a fiddler, and we all must dance. From gloom where mocks that will-o'-wisp, Free-will I heard a voice cry: ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... signature is here and there recognisable among these cosmopolitan productions. A famous Italian opera star has rhymed in her native lingo; a popular French acrobat—possibly one of a company of strolling equestrians—has immortalised himself in Parisian heroics. M. Pianatowsky, the Polish fiddler, has scrawled something incomprehensible in Russian or Arabic—no matter which; while Mein Herr Van Trinkenfeld comes out strong in double Dutch. Need I add that the immortal Smith of London is in great force in the ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... is nothing upright nor grateful in them: never was there a drop of even Scotch blood in their veins. Indeed, we have a clue to their bedchamber still hanging on the door, and I suspect that an Italian fiddler or French valet has more than once ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... Other poems were of a lighter cast and intended to be sung to the accompaniment of the harp. These were the crowning scandal of his imperial vagaries in the eyes of patriotic Romans. "With our prince a fiddler," cries Juvenal, "what further disgrace remains?" King Lewis of Bavaria and some other great personages of our era would perhaps object to Juvenal's conclusion. With all these accomplishments, however, Nero either could not or would not speak. He had not the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Charley Bates' tight features relaxed at the sight, and MacDonald went over and joined the three at the bar. With the advent of Burning Daylight the whole place became suddenly brighter and cheerier. The barkeepers were active. Voices were raised. Somebody laughed. And when the fiddler, peering into the front room, remarked to the pianist, "It's Burning Daylight," the waltz-time perceptibly quickened, and the dancers, catching the contagion, began to whirl about as if they really enjoyed it. It was known to them ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... Music and dancing enlivened the inmates when their day's toil was over and time had to be killed. Thus, within, one could find anxious deliberation and warm debate; without, noisy revel and vulgar brawl. "Fate's a fiddler; life's a dance." ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... fiddlers—all of them, black or white—how wonderful they were! They have always been the wonder and the despair of all musicians who have played by rule and note. The very way that the country fiddler held his fiddle against his chest and never against his shoulder like the trained musician! The very way that the country fiddler grasped his bow, firmly and squarely in the middle, and never lightly at the end like a trained musician! The ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... a popular old air That every fiddler loves to scrape. 'T is wrung from organs everywhere, To ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... a fiddler from the village, and it was not long before most of the company were treading the measures of reels or cotillons on the grass. How merry and happy they all were! How freely and unembarrassedly they moved and talked! By ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... knowledge. Mrs. Micawber's singing has been described as the table-beer of acoustics. Eskimo singing is something more. The beer has become flat by the addition of ice. One of our engineers, who is quite a fiddler, experimented on his instrument with a view to seeing what effect music would have on the "savage breast," but his best efforts at rendering "Madame Angot" and the "Grande Duchesse" were wasted before an unsympathetic audience, who showed as little appreciation ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... haven't fell through into the cellar, as me grandmither did when she danced down the whole party, and landed on the bottom, and kept up the jig without a break, keep ing time with the one-eyed fiddler above." ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... side-board was placed for us, who had come off the sea, a substantial dinner, and a variety of wines. Then we had coffee and tea. I observed in the room several elegantly bound books and other marks of improved life. Soon afterwards a fiddler appeared, and a little ball began. Rasay himself danced with as much spirit as any man, and Malcolm bounded like a roe. Sandie Macleod, who has at times an excessive flow of spirits, and had it now, was, in his days of absconding, known by the name of M'Cruslick, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... A fiddler was caught, a beautiful slow minuet played, and a bit of "solemn dancing" done. Certainly it was not gay, but it must be owned it was beautiful; it was the dance of kings, the poetry ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... for this object of their ambition. The want of a regular education, and early habits, and some lurking remains of their dignity, will never permit them to become a match for an Italian eunuch, a mountebank, a fiddler, a player, or any regular practitioner of that tribe. The Roman emperors, almost from the beginning, threw themselves into such hands; and the mischief increased every day till the decline and final ruin of the empire. It is therefore of very ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... simple and not too improbable, and the characters well individualized. Here, also, Mr. Trowbridge is most successful in his treatment of the less ambitiously designed figures. The relation between the dwarf Hercules fiddler and the heroine Marie seems to be a suggestion from Victor Hugo's Quasimodo and Esmeralda, though the treatment is original and touching. Indeed, there is a good deal of pathos in the book, marred here and there with the sentimental extract of Dickens-flowers, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... business man, and a promise was a promise. He had enjoyed the consideration for his promise; his notes were secure and the hypothecated bonds had been redeemed. He was on his feet and Governor, thanks to Elton's interposition, and now he was called on to do his part—to pay the fiddler. ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... be so artfully applied, Insensibly came on her side. It was an unforeseen event; Things took a turn he never meant. Whoe'er excels in what we prize, Appears a hero in our eyes; Each girl, when pleased with what is taught, Will have the teacher in her thought. When miss delights in her spinet, A fiddler may a fortune get; A blockhead, with melodious voice, In boarding-schools may have his choice: And oft the dancing-master's art Climbs from the toe to touch the heart. In learning let a nymph delight, The pedant gets a mistress by't. Cadenus, to his grief and shame, Could scarce oppose Vanessa's ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... announcement with regard to Castrucci, the violinist, namely, that he would play a solo "in which he engages himself to execute twenty-four notes in one bow." This piece of charlatanism, so misplaced in a truly able musician, was excellently capped on the following day by a nameless fiddler advertising his intention to play twenty-five notes in ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... relieved himself by cracking jokes with the passers-by. I have spoken of his warm affection for me. He also—notwithstanding his rough outside—possessed a talent for music, and could not only sing a capital song, but had learned to play the violin from an old fiddler, Peter McLeary, who had presented him with an instrument, which he valued like the apple of his eye. He now carried it in its case, strapped carefully on behind him. We rode on too fast to allow of his playing it, as I have seen him do on horseback many ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... and the bridesmaids simpered and tasted, and I made a speech with airy bacchanalianism, glass in hand. But poor Jim must leave the wine untasted. "Don't touch it," I had found the opportunity to whisper; "in your state it will make you as drunk as a fiddler." And Jim had wrung my hand with a "God bless ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... fiddler, in Islay, who told the story of Conall, as it had been handed down by tradition from generation to generation; just as thousands of years before the story of Odysseus and Polyphemos was told by Greek bards to ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... The best fiddler of the parish could not come until later, so meanwhile they had to content themselves with the old one, a houseman, who went by the name of Gray-Knut. He knew four dances; as follows: two spring dances, a halling, and an old dance, called ...
— A Happy Boy • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... of an hour at least, on the ground adjoining the mausoleum, and after the dance sing the 100th Psalm of the old version, to the fine old tune to which the same was then sung in St. Ives Church; one pound to a fiddler who shall play to the girls while dancing and singing at the mausoleum, and also before them on their return home therefrom; two pounds to two widows of seamen, fishers, or tinners of the borough, being sixty-four years old or upwards, who shall attend the dancing ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... abroad. She had not liked Europe—being quite frankly a provincial person. To Castleman County a foreigner was a strange, dark person who mixed up his consonants, and was under suspicion of being a fiddler or an opera-singer. The people she had met under her husband's charge had been socially indubitable, but still, they were foreigners, and Sylvia could never really be sure what they ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... nearly reached the ground, covered with a thick crop of grass, fog, and house-leeks, it resembled an overgrown grave. On inquiry, however, Ravenswood found that the man of the last mattock was absent at a bridal, being fiddler as well as grave-digger to the vicinity. He therefore retired to the little inn, leaving a message that early next morning he would again call for the person whose double occupation connected him at once with the house of mourning and ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... overtures. Tall, stout, fresh, pleasant growth of the open air and the hills, as she was, she never dreamed of despising the little skipping tailor of Rapps, though he was shorter by the head than herself. She had heard his music, and evidently had danced after it. The fiddler and fiddle together filled up her ambition. But the old people!—they were in perfect hysterics of wrath and indignation. Their daughter!—with the exception of one brother, now absent on a visit to his uncle in Hungary, a great gold-miner in the Carpathian mountains, the sole remnant ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... I know is that Mary Simmons says she gave ten thousand dollars and Josie Fiddler says it was three hundred,—so you ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... Smith was a good white man. He was a grand fiddler and he used to call us to de big house at night to dance for him. I couldn't do nothin' 'cept jump up and down and I sho' did git tired. Marse Jabe warn't married. He raised his brother's chillun, but dey was all grown when de war ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... he cried, and the fiddler struck up the first note of the Virginia Reel. Daddy led out Rose, and the dance began. He straightened up till his tall form towered above the rest of the boys like a weather-beaten pine tree, as he balanced and swung ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... vaulted room sat a fiddler and a fine-featured gipsy-girl with a zither; their instruments lay in their laps, and they seemed to be looking about them with ...
— Immensee • Theodore W. Storm
... called Out of Paganini—founded upon that distinguished fiddler's life, although (as the Author says) "it is necessarily speculative as ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... of harmony were all acquiescence—every instrument was tuned and toned, and, striking up one of their most ambrosial airs, the whole band followed the count to the lady's apartment. At their head was the first fiddler, who, bowing and fiddling at the same moment, headed his troop, and advanced up the room. Death and discord!—it was the marquess himself, who was on a serenading party in the country, while his spouse had run away from town.—The rest may be imagined; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 474 - Vol. XVII. No. 474., Supplementary Number • Various
... The old fiddler watched her with delight. "You shall hear all my stories," he said; "everything you shall hear, little Melody; but here we are at the house now, and I must make my manners to ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards
... long—the cruel hardship, war, sickness, hunger, and then, besides, the faith, the kindliness, the light-heartedness that had saved them through it all. There were tunes that every man and woman in Ireland knows—tunes that you know—old airs that every Irish fiddler or piper or singer learns from the older ones, that the oldest ones of all learned, they say, from the fairies. And under all the music, whether grave or gay, there went a strain of grief, sometimes almost harsh and sometimes ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost
... served their appointed days and passed on their several courses to become mere memories, as shadowy and unsubstantial as the gleam of their own topsails when seen at twilight. The souls of their sailors have fled to Fiddler's Green, where all dead mariners go. They were of the old merchant marine which contributed something fine and imperishable to the story of the United States. Down the wind, vibrant and deep-throated, comes their ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... American, and "just as good as her employers," with whom she always ate and sat. It was not Mrs. Markham's custom to keep a girl the year round, but when she did it was Eunice Plympton, the daughter of the drunken fiddler who earned his livelihood by playing for the dances the young people of Olney sometimes got up. He was anticipating quite a windfall from the infair it was confidently expected would be given by Mrs. Markham in honor of her son's marriage; and Eunice herself ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... said a farmer, who was standing by, "he's gone to get drunk; he is the biggest old drunkard in the countryside, and yet they do say he was gentleman once, and the best fiddler in London; but he can't be depended on, so no one ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... so good as to confess to me: you were not unwell! You did not go only into the garden! you went into the wood, and you remained a long time there! I saw it! You made a little visit to the handsome woman while the fiddler was here, did you not? I do not ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... with our usual good fortune, we again got into deep water, and in half an hour anchored off the town in a favourable position for cannonading it. We then landed our force, consisting of all the marines, with the drummer and fiddler, besides a party of small-arm men from the blue jackets, all armed with muskets, bayonets, and cutlasses. The officers, in addition to their swords, carried pistols in their belts. A feu-de-joie was now ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... Party," the men passed a house at which Admiral Montague was spending the evening. The officer raised the window and cried out, "Well, boys, you've had a fine night for your Indian caper. But, mind, you've got to pay the fiddler yet." "Oh, never mind," replied one of the leaders, "never mind, squire! Just come out here, if you please, and we'll settle the bill in two minutes." The admiral thought it best to let the bill stand, and ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... of dried vegetables that hung from the roof and on the copper kettles and saucepans ranged along the wall. The wind raged against the shutters of the unglazed windows, and the maid-servants, distaff in hand, crowded closer to the blaze, listening to the songs of some wandering fiddler or to the stories of a ruddy-nosed Capuchin monk who was being regaled, by the steward's orders, on a supper of tripe and mulled wine. The Capuchin's tales, told in the Piedmontese jargon, and seasoned with strange allusions and boisterous laughter, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Then man the capstan—off we go, As the fiddler swings us round, With a yeo heave ho, And a rum below, Hurrah for the ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... who tried to convince her that George had a right to his opinion, "though I am sure you must have pretty nigh all the books in the world already. But I never can desire—I may be wrong, but I never can desire—that my son, and the grandson of the Marquis of Esmond, should be a fiddler." ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 'fancy' is a little tomtit of a fiddler of eighteen, cannot in conscience make such a boy marry the girl. Besides, she has no cause to do him an ill turn.—Indeed, Monsieur Cardot wants a man of thirty at least. Our notary, I feel sure, will be proud to have a famous man for his son-in-law. So just feel yourself all over.—You will ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... don't let us waste our time on the Jew-problem ... our own little Jew-problem is enough, eh? Get rid of this little fiddler. Then I may have a look in. ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... much more was to be done, that I might be universally allowed to be a fine gentleman. I appeared at court on all publick days; betted at gaming-tables; and played at all the routs of eminence. I went every night to the opera, took a fiddler of disputed merit under my protection, became the head of a musical faction, and had sometimes concerts at my own house. I once thought to have attained the highest rank of elegance, by taking a foreign singer into keeping. But my favourite fiddler contrived ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... blessing on one and all Beneath this roof abiding! The road must be faced. To the fiddler we call: Tune up! Our cares deriding, With dance and with song We'll shorten the way so weary and long. Right merrily off ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... son, beware of your partner in the dance of life; for, as Mahomet used to say, in his jocular moods, 'those who will dance must pay the fiddler.' To be tied, forever, for better, for worse, to such a —— as Amina Ghoul, is to be transformed in one's whole nature. It is the transmigration of a soul from amiability to peevishness, from activity to discouragement, from love to hate, and from ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... by a bridge, and is played on by a bow." "The word Cruth is pronounced in English Crowth, and corruptly Crowd." "Lueth is the Saxon appellation given by Leland, for the instrument (Collectanea: vol. v.)" "A player on the cruth was called a Crowther or Crowder, and so also is a common fiddler to this day; and hence, undoubtedly, Crowther, or Crowder, a common surname. Butler, with his usual humour, has characterised a common fiddler, and given him ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... NEP is "At Home" to the Sailors of France. Old foes turn new friends as their reason grows riper; "All hands for Skylarking!" A measure we'll dance, With friendship for fiddler and pleasure for piper. 'Tis a good many years since they sought our white shore; Once more at hands'-grip we are glad to have got 'em. As to Jingos or Chauvinists,—out on the bores! Such Jonahs should promptly ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 22, 1891 • Various
... John the Baptist's Church, with all the fiddlers of the county playing before the Lord of Dutton, and then at the court renew their licenses yearly; and that none ought to use the trade or employment of a minstrel, or fiddler, either within the city or county, but by an order and license of that court." I find too that this privilege has received the sanction of the legislature; for by the Act of 17 George II., cap. 5., commonly called the Vagrant Act, which includes "minstrels" under ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 405, December 19, 1829 • Various
... bit. I'm fit as a fiddler. Don't worry, love. I've no business to talk riddles to you, of all people. But for a peculiar reason I'm horribly anxious about the outcome of to-morrow's experiment, and had to work it off somehow. Just promise me that when you say your prayers to-night you'll ask the good God not to let me be ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... not such grand people as Mrs Tagliabue, or the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Babbleton. I thought so too; every one was happy, and every one at their ease; and I do believe they would have stayed much longer, but the musicians took so much punch that one fiddler broke his fiddle, the other broke his head in going down the steps into the garden, and the fifer swore he could blow no longer; so, as there was an end to the music, clogs, pattens, and lanterns were called for, the shawls were brought out of the kitchen, and every ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... it myself!" said the Fiddler Crab. "But it's highly classical, I admit. All really great ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... put on de soldier clo's. He's a "dead shore shot," gwineter kill dem crows. He takes "Pot," an' "Skillet" from de Fiddler's Ball. Dey're to dance a liddle jig while Jim ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... Washington spent between forty and seventy-five pounds at each of these elections, and usually gave a ball to the voters on the night he was chosen. Some of the miscellaneous election expenses noted in his ledger are, "54 gallons of Strong Beer," "52 Do. of Ale," "L1.0.0. to Mr. John Muir for his fiddler," and "For cakes at the ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... and jolly. The fiddler swept his bow across the strings until they sang their gayest polka. The accordion puffed and wheezed in its attempt to follow the merry tune. The platform was crowded with dancers, whirling and stamping, turning ...
— Gerda in Sweden • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... produce the belief that it is tracery work of wood. We ascended the rough stone steps through a winding stair to the turrets, where we had such a view of the surrounding country, as can be obtained from no other place. On the top of the centre and highest turret, is a grotesque figure of a fiddler; rather a strange looking object, we thought, to occupy the most elevated pinnacle on the house of God. All dwellings in the neighbourhood appear like so many dwarfs couching at the feet of the Minster; while ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... "A Journey from this World to the Next." The Emperor Julian is depicted in it, recounting in Elysium the adventures he had passed through, living successively in the character of a slave, a Jew, a general, an heir, a carpenter, a beau, a monk, a fiddler, a wise man, a king, a fool, a beggar, a prince, a statesman, a soldier, a tailor, an alderman, a poet, a knight, a dancing master, and a bishop. Whoever would see how vividly, with what an honest and vigorous verisimilitude, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... their interest and romantic effect to the principle here spoken of. Were they constant, they would become indifferent, as we may find with respect to disagreeable noises, which we do not hear after a time. I know no situation more pitiable than that of a blind fiddler who has but one sense left (if we except the sense of snuff-taking(1)) and who has that stunned or deafened by his ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Hopewell found it, and strung it himself, and used to play on it slyly, and so taught himself to be a fiddler, before his mother had any idea he knew one note from another. She was extremely deaf at the last and could not hear him playing at odd times, up in ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... The fiddler struck up a lively tune, and the queen, with marvelous lightness of step and ogling glances, ambled up to a tall, raw-boned Methodist preacher, who had come with me, and invited him to dance with her. The poor parson seemed ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... dem gals and bucks what cuttin' de cane. When dey git done makin' sugar, he give a drink call 'Peach 'n Honey' to de women folk and whiskey and brandy to de men. And of all de dancin' and caperin' you ever seen! My pa was fiddler and we'd cut de pigeon wing and cut de buck and every other kind of dance. Sometime pa git tired and say he ain't gwineter play no more and us gals git busy and pop him corn and make candy, so to ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... created in the hall by the joshing that the Suggs' ranch outfit had directed toward the fiddler, who knew only one tune, and sawed that off for a waltz, quadrilles, and two-steps, ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... of the ancients." In Yorkshire, the water-scrophularia (Scrophularia aquatica), is in children's language known as "fiddle-wood," so called because the stems are by children stripped of their leaves, and scraped across each other fiddler-fashion, when they produce a squeaking sound. This juvenile music is the source of infinite amusement among children, and is carried on by them with much enthusiasm in their games. Likewise, the spear-thistle (Carduus lanceolatus) ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... out of possession of by others, let him assert his right in the Supreme Court, and let him or his antagonist, whichever may be found in the wrong, pay the costs of suit. It is an old maxim, and a very sound one, that he that dances should always pay the fiddler. Now, Sir, in the present case, if any gentlemen, whose money is a burden to them, choose to lead off a dance, I am decidedly opposed to the people's money being used to pay the fiddler. No one can doubt that the examination proposed by this resolution must cost ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... have an end; even the stanchest mountain fiddler will reach at last his limit of endurance and must needs be refreshed and fed. There was a sudden significant flourish of frisky bowing, now up and again down, enlisting every resonant capacity of horsehair and catgut; the violins quavered to a final long-drawn ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... this, Andy," said he, "and these two gallant animals will never recover it after the severe day's hunting they've had. Poor Fiddler and Piper," he exclaimed, "this has proved a melancholy day to you both. What is to be done, Andy? I am scarcely able to stand, and feel as if my ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... prized that soon the school became a source of steady support to us all. Old "Uncle" Conrad—or Coonrod as we used to call him—the high-shouldered old pedagogue who was at once teacher, tithing-man, herb-doctor, and fiddler for our section, grumbled a little at the start; but either he had not the heart to take the bread from our mouths, or his own lips were soon silenced by the ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... other cottages—to Mrs. Symons's (daughter-in-law to the old widow living next door) who had an 'unwell boy,' then across a little burn to another old woman's, and afterwards peeped into Blair's, the fiddler. We drove back and got out again to visit old Mrs. Grant (Grant's mother), who is so tidy and clean, and to whom I gave a dress and a handkerchief; and she said, 'You're too kind to me, you're over kind to me, ye give ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... from reaching Constantinople in time to witness these festivities. [Sidenote: SESTOS.—TURKISH COLONEL.] The breeze, however, suddenly veering round to the south, swiftly went round the capstan, and merrily did our band, the solitary fiddler, rosin away to the tune of "drops of brandy," while, with every stretch of canvass set, we joyfully proceeded in our course, saluting the Pasha, according to custom, as we came abreast of the village of the Dardanelles, ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... present moment, dear mamma, I find marriage a delightful affair, I can spend all my tenderness on the noblest of men whom a foolish woman disdained for a fiddler,—for that woman evidently was a fool, and a cold fool, the worst kind! I, in my legitimate love, am charitable; I am curing his wounds while I lay my heart open to incurable ones. Yes, the more I love Calyste, the more I feel that I should die of grief if ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... A poor ragged fiddler had spent the whole of one bitter winter morning playing through the dreary streets without any taking pity upon his plight. As he came to the cathedral he felt an overmastering desire to enter and pour out his distress ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... change of public passion whispered itself into rhyme or quaint saying. By the time he had grown to manhood he was the admitted rector of all the ballad-mongers of the Liberties. Madden, the weaver, Kearney, the blind fiddler from Wicklow, Martin from Meath, M'Bride from heaven knows where, and that M'Grane, who in after days, when the true Moran was no more, strutted in borrowed plumes, or rather in borrowed rags, and gave out that there had never been any Moran but himself, and many another, did ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... filium Dei blasphemias evomuit. Verum cum virtute verbi Dei a parocho victus esset, intolerabili post se relicto foetore abiit." Splendidly dressed, with two companions, he frequented an honest man's house at Rothenberg. He brought with him a piper or fiddler, and contrived feasts and dances under pretext of wooing the goodman's daughter. He boasted that he was a foreign nobleman of immense wealth, and, for a time, was as successful as an Italian courier has been known to be at one of our fashionable watering-places. But the importunity of the guest ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Prim and his charming daughter, not to be outdone by their neighbors, cleared the front drawing-room of its heavy furniture, covered every inch of the tufted carpet with linen crash, and with old black Jones as fiddler and M. Robinette—a French exile—as instructor in the cutting of pigeon wings and the proper turning out of ankles and toes, opened the first of a series of morning soirees for the young folk of the neighborhood, to which were invited not only their mothers, but their black mammies ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... had been taken outdoors by willing hands; the pupils' benches stood along the walls for the "women folk" during the intermissions; upon the slightly raised platform at one end of the room were the chairs for the musicians, fiddler and guitarist. And upon the floor was much shaved candle. For light there were the four coal-oil lamps with their foolish reflectors against the walls, and a full moon shining in through door ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... fork out—for this poor devil here will have to pay the fiddler, since it is he ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... spy out the instruments, and listen for their respective sounds. You would know the gulf that separates a French horn from an English horn, and you would perceive why a player of the hautboy gets higher wages than a fiddler, though the fiddle is the more difficult instrument. You would live at a promenade concert, whereas previously you had merely existed there in a state of beatific coma, like a baby gazing ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... here," cried Daffy-down-dilly to his companion; "for Mr. Toil will never dare to show his face where there is a fiddler, and where people are dancing and making merry. We ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... restaurant at that moment and began to play wildly. The shock of his strange advent momentarily silenced the quarrel; but soon it leaped up again, under the shelter of the noisy music,—the common, tedious, tippler's quarrel. It rose higher and higher. The fiddler looked askance at it over his fiddle. Chirac cautiously observed it. Instead of attending to the music, the festal company attended to the quarrel. Three waiters in a group watched it with an impartial sporting interest. The English voices grew ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... before me—one of the old school, rough as a bear, and drunken as a Gosport fiddler. My mother was—my mother, and I shall say no more. My father was invalided for harbour duty after a life of intoxication, and died shortly afterwards. In the meantime I had been, by the kindness of the port-admiral's ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... In came a fiddler with a music book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers, whose hearts they broke. In came all the young ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... in a letter from Cambridge to the Christian Observer, very feelingly states the case of a Gypsey family, the father of which, being a travelling tinker and fiddler, intimated, he would be glad to have all his children brought up to some other mode of life, and even to embrace some other himself; but he finds a difficulty in it. Not having been brought up in ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... German form of modern Ger. Wacht, watch. Modern French still has the verb guetter, to lie in wait for, and guet, the watch. Minstrel comes from an Old French derivative of Lat. minister, servant. Modern Fr. menetrier is only used of a country fiddler ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... the last note died away, when "Shout, shout, the devil's about," was heard from a stentorian voice. Above the peals of laughter with which the words were received, rose Jake's voice, "Come on, ole fiddler, play somefin a nigger kin kick up his heels to; what's de use of singing after dat fashion; dis ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... Clasby. "No fiddler has ever stood at my door but had the good word to say of me. Not one of them could ever say that he went thirsty from ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... was revenged the following winter by a dark-haired Roumanian fiddler, who beat her and forced her to carry her jewels to a pawnshop, where they were redeemed at half price by their original donour and used to adorn the plump, firm body of a stupid ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... are not quite so punctual as you would have me believe," said Mr. Percy; "there is not even a fiddler visible." ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... mighty po' this winter, and Ah wish you would pardon mah old man. He is a fiddler same as you is, and he's in ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... the child on your knee, What dower bring you to the land of the free? Hark! does she croon That sad little tune That Chopin once found on his Polish lea And mounted in gold for you and for me? Now a ragged young fiddler answers In wild Czech melody That Dvorak took whole from the dancers. And the heavy faces bloom In the wonderful Slavic way; The little, dull eyes, the brows a-gloom, Suddenly dawn like the day. While, watching these folk and their mystery, I forget ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... "His Majesty," "is anything wanting? Tell us. Yer wish shall be gratified. Does ye wish for music? A piper an' a fiddler too are both convaynient, an', begorra, thim fellers can bate out-an'-out all the pipers an' fiddlers this side av the Bay av Biscay. They're both Irishmen, so they are, an' they're our sworn body-gyard, an' there ye have ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... the liquor which was brought for them, Dennis drank in a loud voice the health of Lord George Gordon, President of the Great Protestant Association; which toast Hugh pledged likewise, with corresponding enthusiasm. A fiddler who was present, and who appeared to act as the appointed minstrel of the company, forthwith struck up a Scotch reel; and that in tones so invigorating, that Hugh and his friend (who had both been drinking before) rose from their seats as by previous ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... in holiday dress with flowers in their hats, a fiddler in the lead. They carry a keg of home-brewed beer and a smaller keg of gin, both decorated with greens which are placed on the table. They help themselves to glasses and drink. Then they sing and dance a country dance to the melody of "There came two ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... afford to despise pedantry: did he meet a traveller who amused his fancy he would give him the pass-word ('the fiddler's paid,' or what not), as though the highway had not its code of morals; nor did he scruple, when it served his purpose, to rob the bunglers of his own profession. By this means, indeed, he raised the standard of the Road and warned the incompetent to embrace an easier trade. While ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... sort of word was that for him to be using, even in his mind? To-morrow she would be gone, this wandering fiddler, and all this would be forgotten in a day, for he had the new cattle to see to, and a hundred ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... he began knocking on the table with his knuckles, as if there was a room full of people asking him to sing. In short, my father was drunk as a fiddler; the last brew finished him; and he began roaring away all kinds of droll songs, and telling all manner of stories as if he ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Whereto the fiddler answered, "Never was king of any land better or happier, nor his kinsmen nor vassals; know that for certain. Right glad were they when we set forth on ...
— The Fall of the Niebelungs • Unknown
... into the restaurant at that moment and began to play wildly. The shock of his strange advent momentarily silenced the quarrel; but soon it leaped up again, under the shelter of the noisy music,—the common, tedious, tippler's quarrel. It rose higher and higher. The fiddler looked askance at it over his fiddle. Chirac cautiously observed it. Instead of attending to the music, the festal company attended to the quarrel. Three waiters in a group watched it with an impartial sporting interest. The English voices ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... elders march ahead; We dance, without a fiddler, We play at cross-touch, White and Red, ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... by previous experiences not to wear perishable finery at the barn dance, and the girls all come in pretty wash-dresses that will stand a good romp. Music is furnished by an old darkey fiddler, not violinist, who plays "Money Musk," "Fisher's Hornpipe," "Ole Dan Tucker" and any number ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... sings," went on the hermit, "it lifts its two wing covers so that the edges meet like the pointed roof of a house. Then your little fiddler, Jack, rubs one ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... was up at a Terrace Garden dance we got acquainted. No music at all in his head; but in his feet—say, he just naturally has to let his toes follow the tune, and if ragtime hadn't been invented he'd have walked slow all his life. And me? Well, I ought to dance, with Father a born fiddler, and Mother brought up with castanets in her hands. We danced twelve of the fourteen numbers together that night, and I never even noticed he had red hair. I'd been dying to dance for months. Some partner, Tim was too. That began it. We joined a class and started learning ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... Fortescue, however,[86] has told us that in his youth the Duke learnt to play the violin, and that he only abandoned it, when he was about thirty years old, "because he judged it unseemly or perhaps ill-sounding for a General to be a fiddler." The Duke is not the only great soldier who has been a musical performer. Marshal St. Cyr used to play the violin "in the quiet moments of a campaign," and Sir Hope Grant was a very ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... me, Miss Trent, but I knew your father well enough, and I knew you when you was a little 'un. In those days I had the "Green Man" in the Cut; your father often enough gave us a toon on his fiddle. A rare good fiddler he was, too! Give us a song now, ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... Lusk. "That's my game! And you done your share," she cried to the fiddler. "Here's my regards, old man! ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... didn't take the thing away he would put it into the fire. He said he was sure it would only turn out a public house "touch," and informed me that it was only one in a thousand who ever got to be anything worth listening to. He endeavoured to impress upon me what a nuisance the old fiddler was on the Fair Day; and "concluded a vigorous speech" by again reminding me that if I didn't take the fiddle out of his sight he would burn it. He did give me the chance to play out of his sight; but, knowing, young as I was, that the ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... it proved. A certain Guetem, a fiddler of the Elector of Bavaria, had entered the service of Holland, had taken part in her war against France, and had become a colonel. Chatting one evening with his comrades, he laid a wager that he would carry off some one of mark between Paris and Versailles. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... on the floor when the other had abandoned it in defeat—that being the test of victory. At last, the girl from Dryhill reeled, and was caught by half-a-dozen arms. Her adversary, holding the floor undisputed, slowed down, and someone stopped the fiddler. Sally turned from the crowded wall, and began looking about for Samson. He was not there. Lescott had seen him leave the house a few moments before, and started over to intercept the girl, as she came ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... "I am a good fiddler. The white folks have taught me to do lots of different things. I have had very few advantages and I cannot ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves, North Carolina Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... arrived; face towards the music-room, good people, and tell me how you like it. I call it "Only a fiddler", after Andersen's story. What ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... day at a house of entertainment which must have been popular, since it contained a dancing-hall, admission to which was free, any man being privileged to invite to it any woman whom he fancied and for whose diversion he was willing to disburse a penny to the fiddler. He was accompanied on this occasion by his dog, who insisted on following him into the hall and persisted in keeping at his heels while he danced,—a proof of its fidelity which created considerable amusement, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... prosperous one, and he laid by money enough to fill two pots. The one he buried in his corn-kiln, the other under the gate of his farmyard. Well, the moujik died, and never said a word about the money to any one. One day there was a festival in the village. A fiddler was on his way to the revel when, all of a sudden, he sank into the earth—sank right through and tumbled into hell, lighting exactly there where the ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... him," she said feverishly to Allan Daly. But somebody else had already asked him. The room grew very silent all at once. Outside the fiddler had stopped for a rest and there was silence there too. Afar off they heard the low moan of the gulf—the presage of a storm already on its way up the Atlantic. A girl's laugh drifted up from the rocks ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... man the capstan—off we go, As the fiddler swings us round, With a yeo heave ho, And a rum below, Hurrah ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... and have a drop of ale; the fiddler is there.' 'No, brother, I never drank a drop of ale since my aunt went (died).' 'Well, take some tobacco, brother?' 'No, no, I have not smoked since my wife fell in the water and never came out again alive.' 'Well, let's go and play at cock-shy, ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... her and her numerous votaries for their own. As the reverend brother thundered out his denunciations of the ungodly goddess he cast his eyes often in the direction of the leading dancer, and from her they would wander to the small fiddler who sat beside the tall hat in a back pew. But somehow neither Lily nor Apollo seemed in the least conscious of any personal appeal in his glance, and when finally the question of the Christmas ball was put to vote, they both rose and unequivocally voted for it. ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... caught, they were ignorance personified as far as sporting matters went. Their original incapacity will be easily credited, when I inform them that my second best man, Buctoo, had followed the sporting occupation of a village fiddler, before he entered my service, and knew as much of the capabilities of an English rifle as he did of the "Pleiades." Jye Sing was a little better informed, for he told me confidentially, one day, he had seen ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... recount these scenes there come to me soft orchestrations of the old tunes that belonged with them. I am thinking of one just now; a mere potsherd of plantation-fiddler's folk-music which I heard first—and last—in the dance at Gilmer's. Indeed no other so widely recalls to me those whole years of disaster and chaos; the daily shock of their news, crashing in upon the brain like a shell into a ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... that's nothin'. By the cut of his jib I'd rate him as a fiddler, an' I remember once, at Brindisi, I was pointed out two counts an' a ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... Sadik Allee had a dress of honour conferred upon him, and an increase of one hundred rupees a-month made to his salary; and Gholam Ruza, and his relative the fiddler, Anees-od Dowla, were seated behind his Majesty in his carriage-and-four, and paraded through the city, as in full possession of his favour. After the King had alighted from the carriage at the palace, the coachman drove the two singers to their apartments in the Mukbura, ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... intelligence that there was to be a beggar's wedding in the neighborhood. He was resolved not to miss the opportunity of seeing so curious a ceremony; and that he might enjoy the whole completely, proposed to Dr. Sheridan that he should go thither disguised as a blind fiddler, with a bandage over his eyes, and he would attend him as his man to lead him. Thus accoutred, they reached the scene of action, where the blind fiddler was received with joyful shouts. They had plenty of ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... of mankind can possibly be. But they are not properly qualified for this object of their ambition. The want of a regular education, and early habits, and some lurking remains of their dignity, will never permit them to become a match for an Italian eunuch, a mountebank, a fiddler, a player, or any regular practitioner of that tribe. The Roman emperors, almost from the beginning, threw themselves into such hands; and the mischief increased every day till the decline and final ruin of the empire. It is therefore of very great importance (provided the thing is not overdone) ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... his life. He therefore employed the Highland tour in hearing all he could, that had any bearing on his now absorbing pursuit, and in collecting materials that might promote it. With this view, when on his way from Taymouth to Blair, he had turned aside to visit the famous fiddler and composer of Scotch tunes, Neil Gow, at his house, which is still pointed out, at Inver, on the Braan water, opposite the grounds of Dunkeld. This is the entry about him in Burns's diary:—"Neil Gow plays—a ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... angrily on the rock, disappeared in a flash of fire like a burst bomb. Joost was hurled twenty feet by the explosion, and lay on the ground insensible until a herdsman found him some hours later. As he suffered no harm from the contest and became a better fiddler than ever, it is supposed that the recording angel did not inscribe his feat of Sabbath breaking against him in large letters. There were a few who doubted his story, but they had nothing more to say when ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... out the instruments, and listen for their respective sounds. You would know the gulf that separates a French horn from an English horn, and you would perceive why a player of the hautboy gets higher wages than a fiddler, though the fiddle is the more difficult instrument. You would live at a promenade concert, whereas previously you had merely existed there in a state of beatific coma, like a baby gazing at ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... swaggeringly towards the taverns. Eager hands helped them to carry in their plunder. In a few minutes the gang was entering the tavern, the long, cool room with barrels round the walls, where there were benches and a table and an old blind fiddler jerking his elbow at a jig. Noisily the party ranged about the table, and sat themselves upon the benches, while the drawers, or potboys, in their shirts, drew near to take the orders. I wonder if the reader has ever heard a sailor in the like circumstance, five minutes after he has touched ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... sawing: so the fiddler in Italian is called the "village-saw" (Sega del villaggio). He is the Alnaschar of the Englished Galland and Richardson. The tale is very old. It appears as the Brahman and the Pot of Rice in the Panchatantra; and Professor Benfey believes (as usual with him) that this, with many others, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... place between them. Finding her husband was irrecoverable, she at length got tired of the hopeless pursuit, and resolved to return home, and console herself with her music and whatever other gratifications she could command. Not long after, she fell in love with a fiddler at a second-rate theatre in Milan, and carried him off to England, which he found, if not the most agreeable, the most profitable business he could engage in. The affair was singular and curious, as showing what society may be induced to ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... here," cried Hugh; "Mr. Toil will never dare to show his face where there is a fiddler, and where people are dancing ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the faint one, Harry, that you and he were acquaintances. Besides, I had seen him, the morning before, in the crowd around the prisoners, and could have sworn he was then—saving your presence, ladies—as drunk as a fiddler. If vehicle had brought him, it could not be any that had passed me on the road, or for certain I should have recognized him. Well, here was a riddle, and I had come no nearer to guessing it when ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... called to me in a pleased voice, 'to-morrow is my birthday; and we are to have a fiddler, and there's a party of boys and girls coming in a cart, and we shall dance. I invite you. Be sociable for ...
— George Silverman's Explanation • Charles Dickens
... know whether I may be able to repeat the exact words that were spoken on the occasion, but some said, "We must not part with our fiddler"; and Charles Churchill threatened to send me to the shades if I attempted to quit the cutter, into which I had gone for the purpose of attending Lieutenant Bligh': and, without further trespassing on the time of the Court, he submits his case to ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life, what manner of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler." ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... to the ball-room floor, and were standing directly in front of the musicians' gallery. The young fiddler, Jim Otis, leaned over ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Westminster Abbey during Dean Stanley's time, and afterwards the Temple Church, as may be gathered from his Short Study on the Templars. In Devonshire he frequented an old-fashioned church where stringed instruments were still played, and was much delighted with the remark of a fiddler which he overheard. "Who is the King of glory?" had been given out as the anthem. While the fiddles were tuning up a voice was heard to say: "Hand us up the rosin, Tom; us'it soon tell them who's ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... making the old gentleman my great-grandfather as drunk as a fiddler, on drugged potheen," says Madam O'Connor, proudly. "The butler and he did it between them; but it was as near being murder as anything you like, because they put so much of the narcotic into the whiskey that the old man didn't come to himself for three days. That's the sort of thing for ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... to move over the face of the waters, but he must remain unseen. We have always thought that the enthusiastic Dublin man in the theatre gallery was after a critic when he cried aloud at the sight of a toppling companion: "Don't waste him. Kill a fiddler with him!" It seems more in consonance with the Celtic character; besides, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... this is a wonderfully wicked world. To find out the two vagabonds would have been hopeless; unless I could have followed them to the Back of Beyond, where the mare foaled the fiddler. ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... church hall, when the sale had ended, the fiddler tuned up his instrument, and several made ready for the dance. It was truly a pleasant sight which met the eyes of a number of the older ones as they sat back near the wall. Grouped around the large room the flower and strength of the neighbourhood chatted ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... above it on the wings of some inner beauty... Once Fred Starratt would have felt some of the father's scorn for Felix Monet—the patronizing scorn most men bring to an estimate of the incomprehensible. What could one expect of a fiddler? Yes, he would have felt something worse than scorn—he would have ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... Malaga, whose 'fancy' is a little tomtit of a fiddler of eighteen, cannot in conscience make such a boy marry the girl. Besides, she has no cause to do him an ill turn.—Indeed, Monsieur Cardot wants a man of thirty at least. Our notary, I feel sure, will be proud to have a famous man for his son-in-law. So just feel yourself all ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... this, the father and mother were talking at table about some new settlers who had recently moved up on the mountain and were about to be married. They had no fiddler for ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... of the vaulted room sat a fiddler and a fine-featured gipsy-girl with a zither; their instruments lay in their laps, and they seemed to be looking about them with ...
— Immensee • Theodore W. Storm
... after the fiddler on the place. Uncle Jim was the fiddler. Andy Jackson, a white boy, raised him. He learned him to read and write in slavery. After slavery I went to learn from a Negro man at night. I learned a little bit. My master wouldn't cared if we had ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... in many a merry bout and pleasant felony; he had not seen the man for two years; a friendly glass was offered and accepted. Two girls were of the party, to oblige whom Robinson's old acquaintance sent for Blind Bill, the fiddler, and soon Robinson was dancing and shouting with the girls like mad—"High cut," "side cut," "heel and toe," "sailor's fling," and ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... where was your sight, OEdipus? you walk with hare's eyes, do you? I'll have them glazed, rogue; an you say the word, they shall be glazed for you: come we must have you turn fiddler again, slave, get a base viol at your back, and march in a tawny coat, with one sleeve, to Goose-fair; then you'll know us, you'll see us then, you will, gulch, you will. Then, Will't please your worship to ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... kingdom; as my mother, who for many years was spouse to a marching regiment, gave me into this bad world, aboard the packet-boat, somewhere between Donaghadee and Portpatrick. By our common family, I mean, Sir, the family of the Muses. I am a fiddler and a poet; and you, I am told, play an exquisite violin, and have a standard taste in the belles lettres. The other day, a brother catgut gave me a charming Scots air of your composition. If I ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... prejudices of writers like Mr. Croker and Lord Macaulay, who, agreeing in little else, agree in denouncing "this miserable mesalliance" with one who figures in their pages sometimes as a music-master, sometimes as a fiddler, never by any accident in his real character of a professional singer and musician of established reputation, pleasing manners, ample means, and unimpeachable integrity. The repugnance of the daughters to the match was reasonable and intelligible, but to appreciate the tone taken by her ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... remained. Very heroically a young man had done nothing. Hurrah and good-bye! The calciums of curiosity turned on an obscure fiddler who, after murdering another young man, had succeeded in bilking ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... saw the white head of John Clerk, of Eldin, that country gentleman who, playing with pieces of cork on his own dining-table, invented modern naval warfare. There was that portrait of Neil Gow, to sit for which the old fiddler walked daily through the streets of Edinburgh arm in arm with the Duke of Athole. There was good Harry Erskine, with his satirical nose and upper lip, and his mouth just open for a witticism to pop out; Hutton ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mainmast of a ship had been erected, and from its summit hung wreaths and fluttering ribbons: this was called a maypole. Men and maids danced round the tree, and sang as loudly as they could, to the violin of the fiddler. There were merry doings at sundown and in the moonlight, but I took no part in them—what has a little mouse to do with a May dance? I sat in the soft moss and held my sausage-peg fast. The moon threw its beams especially upon one spot, where ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... too improbable, and the characters well individualized. Here, also, Mr. Trowbridge is most successful in his treatment of the less ambitiously designed figures. The relation between the dwarf Hercules fiddler and the heroine Marie seems to be a suggestion from Victor Hugo's Quasimodo and Esmeralda, though the treatment is original and touching. Indeed, there is a good deal of pathos in the book, marred here and there with the sentimental extract of Dickens-flowers, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... the simplest manner in the world. A fortnight since I happened to be sitting in the stocks, in the absurd but accursed town of Bovey Tracey in Devonshire. My companion—for the machine discommodated two—was a fiddler, convicted (like myself) of vagrancy; a bottle-nosed man, who took the situation with such phlegm as only experience can breed, and munched a sausage under the commonalty's gaze. 'Good Lord,' said I to myself, eyeing him, 'and ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... the end of the family scene previously described, a noise was heard without, the latch was lifted, and a troop of Lecour's neighbours and dependants pushed in, an old fiddler at their head, who, clattering forward in sabots, removed his blue tuque from his head, and politely ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... experiences abroad. She had not liked Europe—being quite frankly a provincial person. To Castleman County a foreigner was a strange, dark person who mixed up his consonants, and was under suspicion of being a fiddler or an opera-singer. The people she had met under her husband's charge had been socially indubitable, but still, they were foreigners, and Sylvia could never really be ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... ambergrise, a stink it lies, But well dispersed, is incense to the skies. P. Who starves by nobles, or with nobles eats? The wretch that trusts them, and the rogue that cheats. Is there a lord who knows a cheerful noon Without a fiddler, flatterer, or buffoon? Whose table, wit or modest merit share, Unelbowed by a gamester, pimp, or play'r? Who copies yours or Oxford's better part, To ease the oppressed, and raise the sinking heart? Where'er he shines, O Fortune, gild the scene, And angels guard him in the golden mean! There, ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... and the rest of us following on. It give us a first-class jolt to find all the girls so quiet-looking; and they being that way braced up the whole crowd to be like a dancing-party back East. To see the boys a-bowing away to their partners, while Jose—he was the fiddler, Jose was—was a tuning up, you wouldn't a-knowed where ...
— Santa Fe's Partner - Being Some Memorials of Events in a New-Mexican Track-end Town • Thomas A. Janvier
... looking to the right or the left, but now the stainless man felt himself dishonored, and with morbid sensitiveness referred everything he saw and heard to his own disgrace, while the inhabitants of the little town made him feel that he had been ill-advised, when he ventured to make a fiddler's daughter ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... him the steps, which he soon learned to perform with a grace perhaps equaled by no living creature other than a fat brown bear. The ladies were at first a little shy and inclined to stand at arm's length, but Mary had set the fashion and the others soon followed. I had taken a fiddler to my room and had learned the dance from Brandon; and was able to teach it also, though I lacked practice to make my step perfect. The princess had needed no practice, but had danced beautifully from the first, her strong young limbs and supple body taking as naturally ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... for more'n twenty year, and in all that endurin' time he's stuck as close to shore as a fiddler. With all his bold talk about ships and sailin', I tell you he warn't ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... now? Why, you're as fine as a fiddler!" cried Mr. Joel Ferris, who was fast becoming familiar, on the strength ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... man so various, that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts, and nothing long; But in the course of one revolving moon Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon: Then all for women, rhyming, dancing, drinking, Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking. Blest madman! who could every hour employ With something new to wish or to enjoy! Railing and praising were his usual themes; And both, to show ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... owner—and a most excellent business man. He had large interests in Colorado. One mine he was going to sell. An old gentleman and his daughter were just ready to buy it. The papers were all drawn, and they were to pay over their money that evening. But some horrid young man, a wandering fiddler or something, got to meddling and persuaded them not ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... from Cambridge to the Christian Observer, very feelingly states the case of a Gypsey family, the father of which, being a travelling tinker and fiddler, intimated, he would be glad to have all his children brought up to some other mode of life, and even to embrace some other himself; but he finds a difficulty in it. Not having been brought up in husbandry, he could not ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... square was represented a marsh area divided into two parts. One of these showed breeding pools, where the immense shore crop develops. The other showed fiddler crabs and other creatures that provide a natural drainage for the meadows inhabited by them. Areas where fiddler crabs live are never mosquito breeders, and as a matter of fact only a small percentage of the entire salt, marsh country is dangerous. Illustrations ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... quarrel, as they did every evening; fowls and goats and pigs were settling down for the night with the squawks and bleats and squeals which also took place every evening; on the brown-hollowed grass-bank between Colgan's and O'Reilly's, old Morissy, the blind fiddler, was feebly scraping and twangling, according to his custom every evening, and, for that matter, all day long. Even the wisps of straw and scraps of paper blowing down the middle of the wide roadway seemed to have whirled over ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... Fiddler, play a little longer! Why this hurry, say? I'm but half-way through a measure— Yet a little play! Smiling in her wreath of flowers Is my love not fair? See us in the charmed circle, Flitting light as air! Haste thee, loved one, for the music Shall be hushed anon... (O sweet ...
— Songs of Labor and Other Poems • Morris Rosenfeld
... came to steal something, as you say the words, sir," Bows said. "Do you mean to say that you came to pay a visit to poor old Bows, the fiddler; or to Mrs. Bolton, at the porter's lodge? O fie! Such a fine gentleman as Arthur Pendennis, Esquire, doesn't condescend to walk up to my garret, or to sit in a laundress's kitchen, but for reasons of his own. And my belief is that you came ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... conduct as yours? One moment you tell me you are going to become the greatest musician in the world, and straight you fill my house with fiddlers. Tri. I am clear out of that scrape now, sir. Old F. Then from a fiddler you are metamorphosed into a philosopher; and for the noise of drums, trumpets, and hautboys, you substitute a vile jargon, more unintelligible than was ever heard at the tower of Babel. Tri. You are right, sir, I have found out ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... the frolic was at its height, an unexpected visitor announced himself. It was Uncle Jake Norris, who lived on the far side of the mountain. The fiddler waved his bow at Uncle Jake, and the boys and girls cried "Howdy," as the visitor stood beaming and smiling in the doorway. To these demonstrations Uncle Jake, "a chunk of a white man with a whole heart," as he described ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... is the fact that magnetism is by no means confined to those who have finely trained intellects or who have achieved great reputations. Some vaudeville buffoon or some gypsy fiddler may have more attractive power than the virtuoso who had spent years in developing his mind and his technic. The average virtuoso thinks far more of his "geist," his "talent" (or as Emerson would have it, "the ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... forth the horses one after the other—Kingmaker, the Fiddler, Pittapat, and the others. We spent a delightful two hours. The sun dropped; the shadows lengthened. From the fields the men began to come in. They drove the wagons and hay ricks into the spacious enclosure, and set leisurely about ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... lips to the liquor which was brought for them, Dennis drank in a loud voice the health of Lord George Gordon, President of the Great Protestant Association; which toast Hugh pledged likewise, with corresponding enthusiasm. A fiddler who was present, and who appeared to act as the appointed minstrel of the company, forthwith struck up a Scotch reel; and that in tones so invigorating, that Hugh and his friend (who had both been ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... tearful ones!" Gerald protested. "It was the tears I would have dried. Tears, idle tears, I know not whence they come; tears from the depth of some despairing fiddler." ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... the dance commenced; the old fiddler struck up some favorite tune, and over the floor they went; the flying feet of the dancers were heard, pat, pat, over the apartment till the clock warned them it was twelve at midnight, or what some call "low twelve," to distinguish it from ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... come, Johnny. There's no get out of it. Here's Jim Mason with me, and we've got orders to stun you and pack you if you show fight. The blessed fiddler from Mudgee didn't turn up. Dave Regan burst his concertina, and they're ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... a time, ever so many thowsand years ago, before there was not no Lord Mares, nor no Shirryffs, nor not ewen no Aldermen, a Gent of the name of Horfay lived in Grease. He was the werry grandest Fiddler of his time, a regler JOEY KIM. Well, he married a werry bewtiful wife, of the name of Yourridisee, and they was both werry appy, till one day, as she was a having a run in a field, a norrid serpent bit her in her heel; so she died. Well, while poor Mr. Horfay is a telling us all about ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... but professes that he does not go by his right name. He sings, plays on the violin wonderfully, composes, is mad, and not very sensible. He is called an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole; a somebody that married a great fortune in Mexico, and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople; a priest, a fiddler, a vast nobleman, The Prince of Wales has had unsatiated curiosity about him, but in vain. However, nothing has been made out against him -.' he is released: and, what convinces me that he is not a gentleman, stays here, and talks of his being ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... wonderfully, composes, is mad, and not very sensible. He is called an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole; a somebody that married a great fortune in Mexico, and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople; a priest, a fiddler, a vast nobleman. The Prince of Wales has had unsatiated curiosity about him, but in vain. However, nothing has been made out against him;[1] he is released; and, what convinces me that he is not a gentleman, stays here, and talks of ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... verbal literalness of translation is with Prout, but the spirit of the fiddler of Beranger glows through the free rendition ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... dismal failure. It is cold at the heart of it. It has no mirth, but is like a dance without music: like a dance of deaf mutes that I witnessed once, pretending to keep time to the inaudible scrapings of a deaf and dumb fiddler. ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... have been called Out of Paganini—founded upon that distinguished fiddler's life, although (as the Author says) "it is necessarily speculative as to ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... to say to the little yellow fiddler, after an evening's frolic at the Interpreter's, "Davids, clear away the tables and the glasses, and play fishes-hornspikes."[55] He was a kind, affectionate creature, and his devotion to "Monsieur Johns" and "Madame ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... streaming ribbons—of tune out of a fiddle. They stand, unsmiling, but not serious, in the broad sunlight opposite the fruit-shop; the pink spider of a hand beats the guitar, the little squat hand, with a brass-and-turquoise ring, forces the reluctant flute, and the fiddler's arm tries to ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... be nothing more beautiful,' said Claude, 'than the two first groups, the fiddler, and then the bride with ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... thunderings and pealings, of course they do! and the third fiddler, little Tweaks, of the county town, goes into fits. Ho, ho, ho, I can't bear it (mimicking); take me out! Ha, ha, ha! O what a one she is! She'll be the death of me. Ha, ha, ha, ha! That's very ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... old Collins', Quite a bunch was there before, You could hear the fiddler calling, And the scraping on the floor. Through the dingy sodhouse window Gleamed a sickly yellow light, Where I helped you from the wagon, Holding you so loving tight. Then they called out, "Choose your pardners, Numbers five, six, ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... which resembles the Danish ballad of Ribolt, was taken down from the recitation of an old fiddler in Northumberland: in one verse there is an hiatus, owing to the failure of the reciter's memory. The refrain should be repeated in ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... nothing, and while his wife calmly slept he tortured himself with questions. How came Racah the priest to be metamorphosed into Racah the pianist? Then the father plucked at the counterpane like a dying fiddler.... ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... belief that it is tracery work of wood. We ascended the rough stone steps through a winding stair to the turrets, where we had such a view of the surrounding country, as can be obtained from no other place. On the top of the centre and highest turret, is a grotesque figure of a fiddler; rather a strange looking object, we thought, to occupy the most elevated pinnacle on the house of God. All dwellings in the neighbourhood appear like so many dwarfs couching at the feet of the Minster; while its own vastness and beauty impress the observer with feelings of awe ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... Tamson is for Thompson and Dabbs for Dobbs (Robert). We have the same change of vowel in Raper, for Roper. Venner generally means hunter, Fr. veneur, but sometimes represents the West-country form of Fenner, the fen-dweller; cf. Vidler for fiddler, and ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... as some of the clear Britishers call him—" laughed Heliobas, putting on his overcoat as he spoke; "the 'Spanish fiddler,' as the crabbed musical critics define him when they want to be contemptuous, which they do pretty often. These, together with the literary 'oracles,' have their special cliques, —their little chalked out circles, in which they, like tranced ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Frederic the Ruler. But there was another Frederic, the Frederic of Rheinsberg, the fiddler and flute-player, the poetaster and metaphysician. Amidst the cares of State the King had retained his passion for music, for reading, for writing, for literary society. To these amusements he devoted all the time that he could snatch from the business of war and government; and perhaps ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... purty an' ez peart ez she kin be. Clever? W'y! she ain't no chicken, but she's good enough for me. What's her name? 'Tis kind o' common, yit I ain't ashamed to tell, She's ole "Fiddler" Filkin's daughter, an' her dad ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... of Sweden on the eve of May Day lads go about carrying each a bunch of fresh birch twigs wholly or partly in leaf. With the village fiddler at their head, they make the round of the houses singing May songs; the burden of their songs is a prayer for fine weather, a plentiful harvest, and worldly and spiritual blessings. One of them carries a basket in which he ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... masculinity of the manager. For, according to Sully, the term when applied to the feminine division of mankind has precisely an opposite meaning. The woman manager (he says) economizes, saves, oppresses her household with bargains and contrivances, and looks sourly upon any pence that are cast to the fiddler for even a single jig-step on life's arid march. Wherefore her men-folk call her blessed, and praise her; and then sneak out the backdoor to see the Gilhooly Sisters do a ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... who has to fork out—for this poor devil here will have to pay the fiddler, since it is ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... the time of my hearing the first music I ever heard—unless you call the singing of the birds music (we had plenty of that), and the bells on the breeze from a distance, when the wind was south. The first music (so to call it) that I heard was from a blind fiddler that came to us. What brought him, I don't know—whether he lost his way, or what; but he lost his way after he left us. His dog seems to have been in fault: but he got into a pool in the middle of the wood, and there he lay drowned, with one foot up on the bank, when I went ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... An old fiddler and more peasants appear. The men sit down on one side of the room, the women on the other, and the former lover, Mikko, thinking himself the bridegroom-elect, cheerfully invites every one to dance. The old fiddler strikes up a merry air, and they dance the ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... Hedgehog appeared in the doorway, three of the younger children, concealed in a bower of branches, commenced to sing an ode composed by Uncle Columbus for the occasion, beginning "Welcome to our honoured guest,"—while a fiddler hired for the occasion accompanied it upon the violin, ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... she was, nevertheless, a heroine of the Amazonian species. She tripped up Pat Morgan, and laid that athlete suddenly on his back, upon the grass plot before the hall door, to his eternal disgrace, when he 'offered' to kiss her, while the fiddler and tambourine-man were playing. She used to wring big boys by the ears; overawe fishwives with her voluble invective; put dangerous dogs to rout with sticks and stones, and evince, in all emergencies, an adventurous spirit ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... was placed for us, who had come off the sea, a substantial dinner, and a variety of wines. Then we had coffee and tea. I observed in the room several elegantly bound books and other marks of improved life. Soon afterwards a fiddler appeared, and a little ball began. Rasay himself danced with as much spirit as any man, and Malcolm bounded like a roe. Sandie Macleod, who has at times an excessive flow of spirits, and had it now, was, in his days of absconding, known by the name of M'Cruslick, which it seems ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... school. Then he spoke of his childish passion for the gardener's little daughter, who had subsequently run away with a lackey; of his first sermon as a young abbate, after which he found in the offertory bag, in addition to the usual collection, a number of love letters; of his doings as a fiddler in the orchestra of the San Samueli Theatre; of the pranks which he and his companions had played in the alleys, taverns, dancing halls, and gaming-houses of Venice—sometimes masked and sometimes unmasked. In telling ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... the first volume, appeared in 1836 and 1837. The value of these stories was not at first perceived, and they sold slowly. Andersen was more successful for the time being with a novel, O.T., and a volume of sketches, In Sweden; in 1837 he produced the best of his romances, Only a Fiddler. He now turned his attention, with but ephemeral success, to the theatre, but was recalled to his true genius in the charming miscellanies of 1840 and 1842, the Picture-Book without Pictures, and A Poet's Bazaar. Meanwhile ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... had watched them awhile she started up, spread her skirts in a sweeping courtesy, and began to dance a gavotte. The fiddler changed his tune, and the girls rested and watched her. Alternately swift and languid, with the changes of the movement, she saluted backward to the floor, or spun on the tips of rapid feet. I had seen her dance many times, but never with ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... various arts to get a doubtful cause; Or, as a dancing master in a jigg, With various steps instructs the dancing prig; Or as a doctor writes you different bills; Or as a quack prescribes you different pills; Or as a fiddler plays more tunes than one; Or as a baker bakes more bread than brown; Or as a tumbler tumbles up and down; So does our author, rummaging his brain, By various methods try to entertain; Brings a strange groupe of characters ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... on him presently, and have him down to breakfast. If young, shall be our brother,—so long as there's anything in him. If—as I partly suspect—old, and a father, marry his daughter. But no; such a fiddler as he can't be married, unless unhappily." Mr. Helwyse runs his hands dreamily through his tangled mane, and shakes it back. If philosophical, he seems also to be romantic and imaginative, and impressionable by other personalities. It is, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... To eat the cheer, And dinner's served, my Lord." The butler bowed; And then the crowd Rushed in with one accord. The fiddler-crab Came in a cab, And played a piece in C; While on his horn, The ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... novel by the Dane Andersen, he of the 'Improvisatore,' which will reach us, it should seem, in translation, via America—she had looked over two or three proofs of the work in the press, and Chorley was anxious to know something about its character. The title, she said, was capital—'Only a Fiddler!'—and she enlarged on that word, 'Only,' and its significance, so put: and I quite agreed with her for several minutes, till first one reminiscence flitted to me, then another and at last I was obliged to stop my praises and say 'but, now I think of it, I seem to have written something ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... copper kettles and saucepans ranged along the wall. The wind raged against the shutters of the unglazed windows, and the maid-servants, distaff in hand, crowded closer to the blaze, listening to the songs of some wandering fiddler or to the stories of a ruddy-nosed Capuchin monk who was being regaled, by the steward's orders, on a supper of tripe and mulled wine. The Capuchin's tales, told in the Piedmontese jargon, and seasoned with strange allusions and boisterous laughter, were ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... agreeable, easy manners. With him I went to Indianapolis, and thence by "stages," waggons, or on horseback through a very dismal country in gloomy winter into the interior of the State. I can remember vast marshy fields with millions of fiddler crabs scuttling over them, and more mud than I had ever seen in my life. The village streets were six inches deep in soft mud up to the doors and floors of the houses. At last we reached our journey's end at a large log-house on a ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... the fiddler. Nibelungen lay. Videl of days of chivalry. Bow fashioned like sword. Hagen of Tronje. Wilhelm Jordan, in "Sigfridsage." Henrietta Sontag and the coming Paganini. Wagner's Volker-Wilhelmj at Bayreuth. ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... with a whoop, the man on the sled contradicted himself. "No, by Moses, to Dick Fiddler's old cabin up the draw. That's where Swiftwater would aim for till the blizzard ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... we went our ways, the harp and violin sounds growing fainter as we receded, till they were like the buzzing of bees in drying clover, and the twilight grew rosier brown. I never met Mat Woods again, though I often heard of his fame as a fiddler. Whether my Anglo-Indian friend found the fortune so vaguely predicted is to me as yet unknown. But I believe that the prediction encouraged him. That there are evils in palmistry, and sin in card-drawing, ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... wife, this Jan Thoreau. They lived a good twenty miles off the north-and-south trail, on an island in the middle of Black Bear Lake. He had never seen the wife. A poor sort of woman, he made up his mind, that would marry a fiddler. Probably a half-breed; maybe an Indian. Anyway, he had no sympathy for her. Without a doubt, it was the woman who did the trapping and cut the wood. Any man who would tote a fiddle around ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... the background. To the right of the bar stands a table, back of which appears an iron door. Two disguised friars (Marten and Nils) are seated at this table drinking beer. The other tables are surrounded by German mercenaries, peasants, and sailors. The door to the street is at the right. A fiddler is seated on top of a barrel. The soldiers are throwing dice. All are drunk and noisy. Hans Windrank, a man from Smaland, a German tradesman, and a Dane are seated together at ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... harper twanged and the fiddler scraped out the tune of their Lancers. Few really knew what had happened, and the newly-made marquis had to fight his way through women who, in skin-tight dresses, danced with wantoning movements of the hips, and threw themselves ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... so various, that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts, and nothing long; But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.'[1] ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... entertain them, one of the midshipmen played upon the violin, and some of my people danced; at this they were so much delighted, and so impatient to show their gratitude, that one of them went over the ship's side into the canoe, and fetched up a seal-skin bag of red paint, and immediately smeared the fiddler's face all over with it: He was very desirous to pay me the same compliment, which, however, I thought fit to decline; but he made many very vigorous efforts to get the better of my modesty, and it ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... of an elderly lady, (who had a fine collection of similar wonders, wherewith she was kind enough to edify her young visitors,) containing a solemn account of the fate of a wicked dancing-party in New Jersey, whose irreverent declaration, that they would have a fiddler if they had to send to the lower regions after him, called up the fiend himself, who forthwith commenced playing, while the company danced to the music incessantly, without the power to suspend their ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... I could cry no more. However, I was determined I would not be done out of my sport after being at the expense of coming, so I went round and borrowed some pins, and pinned up my shirt tail as well as I could. I then went into the dance, and told the fiddler to play me a jig. Che, che, che, went the fiddle, when the banjo responded with a thrum, thrum, thrum, with the loud cracking of the bone player. I seized a little Sambo gal, and round and round the room we went, my money and my buttons going jingle, jingle, jingle, seemed to take ...
— Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky • Jacob D. Green
... and Uncle Dan'l and Uncle Summer uster been fiddler. Gone all round when the white people gone to Prospect to ball and sich as that. Dem white people didn't treat you so brutish! Dem obersheer!" (Aside) "Wonder Christ sake why Lula stay out that ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... as she was, knew all this. She knew that Fico, or Signor Tagliafico, was a struggling musician and not an artist in any sense of the word. She knew he was an ordinary Italian fiddler who preferred to fiddle for food rather than to work manually for it. And yet her aunt had confided to her that she was sure he was a count, because one day Miss Husted had asked him the question, and the man, not quite understanding, ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... well. And for diversion went farther into the woods to hear a fiddler and to have him teach me the art which fled my dull fingers and the unwieldy bow. And this fiddler! His curly hair, always wet from his lustrations for the evening meal; his cud of tobacco; his racy locutions; his happy and contented spirit; and his merry wife and ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... to be a bull fiddler any more than you or you or you, and it's greatly to his credit and indicative of his iron will, consuming ambition and extraordinary musicianship that he developed, according to authoritative opinion, into the best bull fiddler ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... When the courier with a red kerchief on a wand came galloping round, the day before, from ile to ile,—for these descendants of a maritime race call their homestead groves islands,—to tell where the ball was to be, he would assert, if there was even a hope of it, that 'Thanase was to be the fiddler. ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... been accustomed. Quiet and orderly, however, as they were disposed to be, this first visit showed them to be as fond of merriment as their countrymen are usually considered; for, on Captain Lyon's ordering his fiddler up on the Hecla's deck, they danced with the men for an hour, and then returned in high glee ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... such grotesque shadows on the wall, The stripling looms a giant stout and tall, While they whose statures reach the common height Seem spectres mocking the hilarious night. From hand to hand the ripened fruit went round, And rural sports a pleased acceptance found; The youthful fiddler on his three-legged stool, Fancied himself at least an Ole Bull; Some easy bumpkin, seated on the floor, Hunted the slipper till his ribs were sore; Some chose the graceful waltz or lively reel, While deeper heads the chess battalions wheel Till some old veteran, compelled to yield, More brave than ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
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