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More "Piano" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she centered on the child's head all her shattered, broken little vanities. She dreamed of high station; she already saw him, tall, handsome, clever, settled as an engineer or in the law. She taught him to read, and even, on an old piano, she had taught him two or three little songs. But to all this Monsieur Bovary, caring little for letters, said, "It was not worth while. Would they ever have the means to send him to a public ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... because her voice had suffered—but still she sang true. She had a musical ear. She could accompany anyone on the piano, pas trop mal. She could dance. Oh, to that she owed her first engagement. She had also learned to play the castagnettes and the tambourine, a l'Espagnole. And she was accustomed to discipline.... ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... with a considerable success. As to myself, I evidently belong to the old school, for I do not understand the music of the present, which consists in a great deal of noise and confusion. Listening the last time to Miss Hilst's playing at Laura's, I thought to myself that if the piano were a man who had seduced her sister, she could not belabor him more mercilessly. She also plays on the harmonium. Her compositions are thought of a great deal here, and considered very deep; most likely because those who could not understand them, hearing them for the tenth time, ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... preparations for a feast, while the men stretched themselves on the sofas in the dining-room. When Mrs. van Warmelo had lit the fire in the kitchen and set the kettle on to boil, Hansie opened the windows of the drawing-room as wide as possible, lit the lamps and candles, and opening the piano, played some "loud music" for the ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... smile. "Well, I like it immensely. I think it's so awfully uncommon. I suppose you could never get a piano that would go with ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... out and wash their faces and comb their hair, a valet would not be necessary. I've seen a man with no legs find a way to jump on a Broadway car and a man without arms can't be kept from playing the piano with his toes. This is because human nature has such a persistent way of trying to do the difficult thing, usually with wonderful success. Man can't fly nor be a fish naturally, but he wants to know how it would feel, and so he makes some startling ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... nor dance; I cannot recite verse nor play upon the piano; I am no acrobat nor leaper nor high kicker; yet I wish to go upon the stage. What shall ...
— American Fairy Tales • L. Frank Baum
... susceptibility of spiders to the sound of a tuning-fork, reports, in "Body and Mind," that by means of this instrument, a spider may be made to eat what it would otherwise avoid. Male birds charm their mates by warbling, and parrots seem to take delight in hearing the piano played, or in listening to ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... garden and dogs and birds and flowers. With his silver-claim money he had fifteen thousand dollars laid away, and she would never know what it meant to be poor. He would educate her and buy her a piano and she would have no end of pretty dresses and things to make her a lady. They would be together and inseparable always, and when she grew up he prayed deep down in his soul that she would be like the older Isobel, ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... her hands, her cheeks all aflame—"do you mean to say you do really and truly play on the piano?" ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney
... a sensation! I slunk back into a clump of bushes where I remained crouched up, watching, meanwhile, my furniture defile past—for everything walked away, the one behind the other, briskly or slowly, according to its weight or size. My piano, my grand piano, bounded past with the gallop of a horse and a murmur of music in its sides; the smaller articles slid along the gravel like snails, my brushes, crystal, cups and saucers, which glistened in the ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... fifteen came under my care to be helped out of a mood of increasing depression and uneasiness. Her glance was furtive, yet anxiously expectant. Tears came unbidden as she sat alone or fingered the keys of the piano. Tactful questioning elicited no response as to reasons for her unhappiness. Opportunities for giving confidence were not accepted. At a chance moment our talk drifted to the subject of menstruation. "Your periods are regular and easy; and do you know what they are ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... must say that I do not admire your taste," laughed Phil. "It's the most hideous discord of noises I ever heard. I never did like the steam piano, but a circus wouldn't ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... smashing what they can with butt-ends of guns. I do not care to follow with words the ghastly truth of the picture into its detail; but the most expressive incident of the whole, and the one immediately to my purpose, is this, that one fellow has sat himself at the piano, on which, hitting down fiercely with his clenched fists, he plays, grinning, such tune as may be so producible, to which melody two of his companions, flourishing knotted sticks, dance, after their manner, on the top ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... Paine has been too busy to work up the matter—that piano wire made in this straight method could be drawn up to and kept at pitch, without approaching very near the elastic limit. In that case not only would they seldom if ever require tuning, but probably all along the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... listened for it half unconsciously; and tried not to hear, instead, Weber's "Invitation a la Valse," which came rippling in intermittent waves from the open window of the distant parloir, where Chardonnet was practising the piano. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... was sitting behind the parlor curtains with Mrs. Trimmer's Roman History, and Grandmamma was sitting, looking very grave in her new black dress, with a pocket handkerchief and book in her lap, and sherry and sponge biscuits on a tray on the piano, for visitors of condolence, when Dr. Brown came in, looking very grave too, and took off one of his black gloves and shook hands. Then he took off the other, and put them both into his hat, and had a glass of sherry and a sponge biscuit, so Margery ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... high descent, was a very aristocratic person: as the presence of the grand piano in the drawing-room would testify. She could no more live without a grand piano than ordinary people could exist without food: the grand piano, albeit a very dilapidated one, was a necessity of her well-descended condition. It was no matter that it displaced more useful furniture; in that ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... describe in a letter! I might as well attempt a panorama in a pill-box! We have fixed our settlement on the left bank of the river. In crossing the rapids we lost most of our heavy baggage, and all our iron work; but, by great good fortune, we saved Mrs. Paisley's grand piano, and the children's toys. Our infant city consists of three log-huts and one of clay, which, however, on the second day, fell in to the ground landlords. We have now built it up again, and, all things considered, are as comfortable as we could expect: and have christened our ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... brain," she said, and began to pace about the room, up and down, up and down. Her mother watched her anxiously. Angelica closed the piano. Dr. Galbraith and the bishop came in from the dining room, and then Edith declared that driving in the open air had made her so sleepy she must ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... On the Saturday and Sunday we practically lived in a beastly little music-room at the offices of the publishers whose songs he proposed to use. A little chappie with a hooked nose sucked a cigarette and played the piano all day. Nothing could tire that lad. He seemed to take a personal interest in ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the piano, and any other packages that can't be accommodated inside the pie, will be hidden around in various other little corners of the room. My plan is to have the cards in the pie, however, and as they are drawn ...
— Grandfather's Love Pie • Miriam Gaines
... works was his second, "Concord" piano sonata, one of the finest, and some would say the finest, works of classical music by an American. It reflects the musical innovations of its creator, featuring revolutionary atmospheric effects, unprecedented atonal musical syntax, and surprising ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... days when he would as soon have thought of mounting the king's throne as of seating himself in that arm-chair. He asks if Miss Stokes—she is the very image of her mamma—if she can play? He should like to hear a tune on that piano. She plays. He hears the notes of the old piano once more, enfeebled by age, but he does not listen to the player. He is listening to Laura singing as in the days of their youth, and sees his mother bending and beating time over the shoulder ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... but neither shook hands with her nor rang the bell to have her shown out Mary found her own way, however, and presently was breathing the fresh air of the twilight fields on her way home to her piano and her books. ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... eyes; such a very little girl that every one in the house looked at her first, and then looked at no one else. She was apparently as unconcerned to all about her, excepting the pretty prima donna, as though she were by a piano at home practising a singing lesson. She seemed to think it was some new sort of a game. When the prima donna raised her arms, the child raised hers; when the prima donna courtesied, she stumbled into one, and straightened ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... athwartships at the after-end; a buffet loaded with richly-cut decanters and glass, backed up by a large gilt-framed mirror, occupied the whole space against the fore-bulkhead between the two entrance doors; and a very handsome piano, open, and with some music on it, occupied a similar position at the after-end of the saloon, two doors in the after-bulkhead proclaiming the existence of at least two more state-rooms. The apartment was lighted during the day by a large skylight filled in with ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... to bed, bathe his head, make Sam, de driver, hitch up de buggy, make West go wid him, and take Marse Gregg home. I never see or hear tell of dat white man anymore, 'til one day after freedom when I come down here to Robinson's Circus. Him drop dead dat day at de parade, when de steam piano come 'long a tootin'. 'Spect de 'citement, steam, and tootin', was too much ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... determined to call at the Kendall home, something he had not done for some time. As he came up to the front walk, between the arbor-vitae hedges, he saw that the parlor windows were alight. The window shade was but partially drawn and beneath it he could see into the room. Helen was seated at the piano and Edwin Raymond was standing beside her, ready to turn the page ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... Warlock that she found Harrods' a confusing place, that she had not yet visited Westminster Abbey, that her health was quite good, that she had no brothers and no sisters, that she could not play the piano, and that she was afraid that she never ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... her from coming to a conclusion. Music, in common with all other accomplishments, was viewed by Miss Miranda as a trivial, useless, and foolish amusement, but she allowed Rebecca an hour a day for practice on the old piano, and a little extra time for lessons, if Jane could secure them without payment of ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... in any Royston household, but it came at the beginning of this century when Lady Wortham as she was always styled—as the daughter of Sir Thomas Hatton, Bart., and wife of Hale Wortham, Esq.—became the owner of the first piano at their house in Melbourn Street (now Mr. ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... Woodville. The scent from the lilac in the vases seemed to harmonise with the chintz furniture, covered with a design of large pink rosebuds and vivid green trellis-work; there was a mandoline on the lacquered piano and old coloured prints on the walls; books and music were scattered about in dainty disorder. Sylvia was sitting on the sofa with her pretty fair head bent down and turned away. She did not move when Savile came in, and he was shocked ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... enthusiasm Miss Fitzmannering pranced into the middle of it. Miss Fitzmannering had kindly allowed herself to be persuaded to do "only a few steps" of her celebrated skirt-dance. Miss Eline Fitzmannering officiated at the piano, and later on, while they were brushing their hair, they quarrelled because she took ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... how I ought to treat her, and the more at ease she appeared, the more embarassed I became. I paid her compliments, she laughed. Conversation was difficult, for I had no great knowledge of French. She took pity on me and sat down at the cottage piano. She played very prettily. Very often she turned round and smiled at me. She was extremely bewitching, and my heart glowed. I envied you. I planned all sorts of base things. I paid court to her. I confess it now. You are ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... himself to the amusement of his aged relatives for an hour or so; but this evening he sat down to the piano at once, with the deliberate intention of playing them off to sleep. Ten o'clock was their hour for retiring, and before that they would not move, although they dozed in ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... Gethryn had been half-conscious of a piano sounding on the floor below. It suddenly struck him now that the apartment under his, which had been long vacant, must ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... good doctor's song. I turned to Miss Boulderstone, from whom I had borrowed a piano, and asked her to play a country dance for us. But first I said—not getting up on a ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... gun to shoot right at my sister Annie, and a big trumpet I can toot just awful loud at granny. I want a dreffle big false face to scare in fits our ba- by. I want a pony I can race around the parlor, maybe. I want a little hatchet, too, so I can do some chopping upon our grand piano new, when mamma goes a-shopping. I want a nice hard rub- ber ball to smash all into flinders, the great big mirror in the hall an' lots an' lots of winders. An' candy that'll make me sick, so ma all night will hold ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... idiots. The latter or accessory movements are those of the hand, tongue, face, and articulatory organs, and these may be connected into a long and greatly diversified series, as those used in writing, talking, piano-playing. They are represented by smaller and more numerous muscles, whose functions develop later in life and represent a higher standpoint of evolution. These smaller muscles for finer movements come into function later and are chiefly associated with psychic ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... two tunes for the Sapphic metre, Greek and Latin, to which my sister, at my request, has added an accompaniment. Will you be so kind as to get Mrs. Nicholson to play the piano while you sing it, and tell me what is to be said to it? While dabbling in some of these tunes, I have translated divers scraps of English poetry into Greek, experimentally, especially to test the possibility of retaining any Greek accent, such as the books mark, in singing. ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... to normality, for which purpose, some quaint and interesting devices are used. One case given is that of a little girl whose senses of sound and form were defective and who therefore could not learn her letters. These letters were pasted on the keys of a piano and she was taught to play a piece with one finger, meanwhile chanting over the names of the letters as they were struck. In this way her sense of sound was trained, she learned her letters and gained ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... established a school of singing at Bologna. His most famous oratorio is entitled "Maria Vergine addolerata," and is without overture or chorus. Burney notes that in the close of this work degrees of diminution of sound, such as "piano," "piu piano," and "pianissimo," are used for the first time. Caldara wrote a large number of oratorios, mostly adapted to the poetry of Zeno and Metastasio, which are said to have been delightful productions. ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... I've set into a saloon listening to that Lady that sings high up—higher than any piano can go. I've set and listened till I didn't know where I was settin'—of course I had to buy a drink, you understand, or I couldn't ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... stands in the centre of the room with a long paper wand, which can be made of a newspaper folded up lengthways, and tied at each end with string. The other players then join hands and stand round him in a circle. Someone then plays a merry tune on the piano and the players dance round and round the blind man, until suddenly the music stops; the blind man then takes the opportunity of lowering his wand upon one of the circle, and the player upon whom ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... a merchant, not for anything. I won't! As if I was brought up for that, and learned French[1], and to play the piano, and to dance! No, no; get him wherever you want to, ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... the house for hours that night. At one moment he found himself in the blue room, Auntie Nan's workroom, so full of her familiar things—the spinning-wheel, the frame of the sampler, the old-fashioned piano, the scent of lavender—all the little evidences of her presence, so dainty, so orderly, so sweet A lamp was burning for the convenience of the doctor, but there was ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... He went to the piano, and Amy sat down again. He sang with his usual inferiority—which was not so inferior that he failed of pleasing simple Amy. She expressed herself delighted. He sang half a dozen songs, then showed her a book of photographs, ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... for his future wife. The very tint of the walls, and the way the light falls in through the windows, would become matters of grave importance. In what pleasant spot shall her favorite chair be placed? And what picture shall hang opposite it to catch her eye the oftenest? Where is her piano to stand? What china, and glass, and silver, is she to use? Where are the softest carpets to be found for her feet to tread? In short, where is the very best and daintiest of every thing to be had, for the best and daintiest little bride the sun ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... to his host, saying: "Tenez, voil ce que vous m'avez demand, mais j'ai peur que cela ne soit pas trop bon." "Que dites vous mon ami?" said Dietrich, after casting his eye over the MS.; "vous avez fait un chef-d'oeuvre." The mayor's wife having tried it on the piano, the orchestra of the theatre were engaged to perform it in the principal square of Strasburg, when such was the enthusiasm it created that the detachment marched off with nearly 1000 instead of 600 volunteers. For them Rouget called the ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... the one who sings madrigals to-night, Uncle; she is going to read Colin a lesson"; and, sitting down at the piano, she let her hands run over the keys and burst out joyously into that variation of Raleigh's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... always some special dainty for tea, and then, after tea, the girls all gathered around the piano in the parlor, and Miss Emma played hymns for them, and they sang until it was time to go to bed. They all enjoyed this. Even the girls who could not sing very well themselves liked to hear the others sing, and they were sorry when the old clock in ...
— Ruby at School • Minnie E. Paull
... the window, looking out into the twilight. Decima stood near the fire in a thoughtful mood. Lucy was downstairs in the drawing-room at the piano. They could hear the faint echo of her soft playing as they sat there in silence. Sibylla was in no humour to talk: she had repulsed Decima rudely—or it may rather be said fractiously—when the latter had ventured on conversation. Lady Verner ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... first floor is the drawing-room, which will be at our disposal," began Frances, evidently quoting "Sister." "It's pretty and sweet, Mother dear, very simple with a little upright piano and quite a number of books and a fireplace. Just behind is a room where we can have our meals. We can use as many bedrooms as we like; there are five and Sister said if we wished, one could be made into an up-stairs-sitting-room. The bathroom was ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... piece faithfully and diligently and purposed to surprise their mother by singing and playing it that very evening. After the Count and Countess had sung several operatic selections, the father turned to his children, saying: "Let us hear what you can do." Albert seated himself at the piano and played, while Marguerite modestly sang in ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne
... on the evening train from the north, so the conspirators would not have long to wait. To pass the brief intervening time Lottie went to the piano and gave them some music like herself, brilliant, dashing, off-hand, but devoid of sentiment and feeling. Then she sprang up and began playing the maddest pranks on languid Bel, and with Addie was soon engaged in a romp with De Forrest ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... feels as bad as that," says I, "I wish she'd wait until mornin' to express herself. That's the most doleful sound I ever heard. Come on; let's go in while you tinkle out something lively and cheerin' on the piano." ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... student but a right jolly companion; a fellow who could pitch into any kind of sport and play an uncommonly good game at almost anything. More than that, he could rattle off ragtime untiringly and his nimble fingers could catch up on the piano any tune he heard whistled. What wonder he speedily became the idol of Colversham? He was a born leader, tactfully marshaling at will the boys who were his own age, and good-naturedly bullying those who ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... short, in the middle of that court, heedless of the crowd of pushing, shouting children who at once gathered about me. I had been struck by an old recollection. My sister used to sing. I remembered where her piano had stood in the great drawing-room. It had been carted away during those dreadful weeks and her music all burned; but the vision of her graceful figure bending over the keyboard was one not to be forgotten even by a thoughtless child. Could it be—oh, heaven! if this ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... and beautiful, lift their heads proudly above the works of art which surround them, and in splendid Chinese cages, birds of gorgeous plumage have learned to caress the rosy lips of their young mistress, or perch triumphantly on her snowy finger. Here are books, too, and music—a harp—a piano—while through a half open door leading from a little recess over which a multaflora is taught to twine its graceful tendrils, a glimpse may be caught of rosy silken hangings shading the couch where the queen of this little realm nightly ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... whole set was ever seen out of its place—not a single Miss Willis of the whole four was ever seen out of hers. There they always sat, in the same places, doing precisely the same things at the same hour. The eldest Miss Willis used to knit, the second to draw, the two others to play duets on the piano. They seemed to have no separate existence, but to have made up their minds just to winter through life together. They were three long graces in drapery, with the addition, like a school-dinner, of another long grace afterwards—the three fates with another sister—the Siamese twins ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... I ever heard in music—is very common, and highly esteemed. The instruments resemble banjos, and there is a harsh kind of drum accompaniment; but there is one larger string instrument, the Japanese piano, upon which much older women play, the younger girls not being sufficiently skilled ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... your knee. A moment or two later, when you called the prisoner, he was intoxicated, and reeled. Do you mean to tell us that a drunken man could have made his way in the darkness, through a cabin filled with chairs, tables, and a piano, in ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... ten: "I should like to be a piano teacher, when I grow up, for then I shall be able to learn to ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... with results that left nothing to be desired. She fell to the floor in helpless, shrieking laughter when he came. In his honour she composed and sang songs to an improvised and spirited accompaniment upon her toy piano. His favourites among these were "'Cause Why I Love You" and "Darling, Ask Myself to Come to You." She rendered them with much feeling. If he were present when her bed-time came she refused to sleep until he had consented to ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... There should be a shop for wood and iron work, or at least a work bench and an anvil. There should be a library of good reading and a place to cook and bake and sew. There should be a typewriter, a piano or an organ, and such other conveniences for teaching and social center work as the community may wish and be able to secure, and, best of all, teachers living at the school who know how to operate the plant in every detail and to make ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... family portraits looked down from the oak panelling above the bookcases, and where the literary element was not obtrusively conspicuous. You felt that it was a room quite as well adapted for conviviality as for study. There was a cottage piano in a snug corner by the fireplace. The Squire's capacious arm-chair stood on the other side of the hearth, Mrs. Tempest's low chair and gipsy table facing it. The old oak buffet opposite the chimney-piece was a splendid specimen of Elizabethan ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... a large one, and it was full of beautiful and valuable things, but the furniture was huddled about in disorder. A large chamber-organ, a grand piano, a mandolin, and two violins, pictures on the floor as well as on the walls, many photographs scattered about everywhere, and the mirror over the mantelpiece fringed with invitation-cards, which were stuck between the glass ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... was no adept in the art of dissimulation, and when she entered the sitting room, Helen was the first to notice her altered countenance. It was fortunate for all present that Alice had seated herself at the piano, at the solicitation of Louis, and ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... porch and the living room were scrubbed spotlessly clean. There was a rug on the floor, while a piano across one corner, a chifforobe with mirrored doors, a bureau, and several comfortable chairs completed the room's furnishings. A motley assortment of pictures adorning the walls included: The Virgin Mother, The ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... of his duty again, in the soothing delight of finding himself, once more free, in all but heart, in the company of Ghita. In this manner the yawl moved ahead, though with materially diminished speed, until, by the formation of the heights, and the appearance of the lamps and candles on the piano, Ghita knew that they were drawing quite near to the indentation of the coast on which is situated ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... distinguish, when necessary, the five-sided Italian model from the rectangular instruments usually produced in northern Europe. Some rectangular virginals were made in Italy; one Flemish polygonal virginal, made by the elder Hans Ruckers in 1591, survives. Long instruments, resembling the grand piano in shape, are called harpsichords. Of course it is understood that both types of virginals as well as the spinet and the harpsichord were keyed chordophones employing the plucking action of jacks ...
— Italian Harpsichord-Building in the 16th and 17th Centuries • John D. Shortridge
... conservatory, to the right, there is a low, oblong tea-table at which are placed three small chairs; and near-by, on the left, are a grand-piano and a music-stool. Against the piano there is a settee, and on the extreme left, below the door, there is an arm-chair with a little round table beside it. At the right-hand window in the wall at the back is another settee, and facing this window ...
— The 'Mind the Paint' Girl - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... the big room. The tables had been moved out, the chairs set round the walls, everything shifted; the chandelier, the stove, and the walls were fantastically decorated with heather and black stuff from the store. The piano stood ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... their long-latent loyalty to the British Empire became too fervent to be restrained within the bounds of decency. "Remnants" of red, white and blue were ostentatiously sewn into a distant resemblance of the British flag; the parlour piano once more did its often unsatisfactory best with the British anthem; mamma's darling received strict injunctions not to play with that horrid little Dutch boy next door; and papa, jingling the sovereigns he had received in his latest deal with the Government, prepared ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... evening some of the sisters played a few pieces at the piano, and Miss Forrester sang a few songs. Mr Hall in the meantime went fast asleep. John Gordon couldn't but tell himself that his evenings at Kimberley were, as a rule, quite as exciting. But then Kattie Forrester did not belong to him, and he had not found himself ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... in the room of one of the girls if preferred. If possible, a piano is included in the furnishings, which may be as elaborate or as simple as desired. Two entrances must be provided, one covered by a square framework supposed to represent a bookcase. Books are across the top. In front of it hangs ...
— The Belles of Canterbury - A Chaucer Tale Out of School • Anna Bird Stewart
... was prompt. At six o'clock he was at my room. In his hand was a small roll addressed to me. On opening it I found it to be manuscript piano music, the Hora Tranquila Valse, or "Tranquil Hour Waltz," by Ernesto Becucci. I came for leopard skins, thought I, and the owner sends me sheet music instead. But the boy assured me that he would have the skins at the hotel at nine next morning, and I entrusted to him the ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... straight from Maslennikoff's to the prison, and went to the inspector's lodging, which he now knew. He was again struck by the sounds of the same piano of inferior quality; but this time it was not a rhapsody that was being played, but exercises by Clementi, again with the same vigour, distinctness, and quickness. The servant with the bandaged eye said the inspector was in, and showed Nekhludoff to a small drawing-room, ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... little wood bordering upon a meadow is her favorite promenade. After half an hour's walk she returns to her room, leaving everyone to act as he pleases. Dinner takes place at six, which is a scene of more careful etiquette than the breakfast table. She walks again after dinner, and returns to the piano, for she is fond of music. The evening is spent in pleasant intercourse with her guests. Sunday is given up to a public theatrical representation for the people. Such is a specimen of ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... introduction to George Eliot, whose works I so admired. Mr. Lewes being away from home when I called, I requested that the introductory letter of Mr. Williams should be taken to George Eliot herself. She received me in the big Priory drawing room, with the grand piano, where she held her receptions and musical evenings; but she asked me if I had any business relating to the article which Mr. Williams had mentioned, and I had to confess that I had none. For once I felt myself at fault. I did not get on with George Eliot. ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... one time to learn the piano, as in that day every girl was, to the saddening of human existence and the torturing of human nerves. After taking a few lessons Barbara was shrewd enough to discover that she had no musical gifts worth cultivating. She therefore promptly requested ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... King's Palace in Luxemburg. On the wall are some handsome gold-framed mirrors, and from the ceiling costly chandeliers with two hundred and twenty lights. The mantel is exquisitely carved marble, with an ormolu frieze. On one side you will note a small piano; it is a French one, of very clear and fine tone, and beautifully finished in every respect. In this room Her Majesty the Queen may be imagined enjoying the balls given to the youthful aristocracy, ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... morning we reached Moldeoen, where the steamer landed us on a rock on which were a few acres of grass and half a dozen wooden houses. We had a good deal of luggage with us, also some casks, cases, and barrels of provisions, and a piano-forte, as our place of sojourn is somewhat out of the way and far removed from civilised markets. A few poverty-stricken natives stood on the rude stone pier as we landed, and slowly assisted us to unload. At the time I conceived that the idiotical expression of their countenances ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... maid must awake to her grief! Honora would never have expected so poetical a flight from her good old governess as the suggestion, 'Play to her;' but she took it eagerly, and going to the disused piano which stood in the room began a low, soft air. The little sleeper stirred, presently raised her head, shook her hair off her ears, and after a moment, to their surprise, her first word was 'Mamma!' Honora was pausing, but the child said, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... apparatus used for the research was made as follows: Two uprights were fastened to a table. These supported a cross-bar about ten inches from the table. To this bar was fastened a row of steel springs which could be pressed down in the manner of piano keys. To each of these springs was fastened a thread which held a bullet. The bullets, which were wrapped in silk to obviate temperature sensations, were thus suspended just above the fingers, two over each finger. Each thread passed through a small ring which ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... Hector opened the piano, and Mrs. Rivington sat down and touched the keyboard. Then she looked around for silence, and it fell completely. All the eye-witnesses present are agreed that it was in the moment of this pause that the drawing-room door ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... you are going to make a shopkeeper's wife of me, so that everyone will laugh at me [ready to cry]; so that I shall be an object of scorn for all. And why have you had me so well educated? Have I learned Russian and French and piano-playing for a man of that sort? What does a shopkeeper want of a piano? Pickle-jars and butter-tubs are useful to him, but not my French! I am curious as to how he would speak to me: Moi aller, vous joli ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... dwarf, seating himself upon a piano-stool, and screwing himself up until he was near the ceiling and on a level with the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... a long-suffering piano was taking cruel punishment at the hands of a flashily dressed, sharp-faced man of horsey type. Flanking him, two young women of the world, with that insouciance which appertains—in Limehouse—to sweet sixteen, were chanting shrilly to his accompaniment: both ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... one commodity directly for another. Where the division of labor has been so little developed that the goods to be exchanged are relatively few, this may work very well, but in modern industry barter would be inexpedient, if not impossible. The farmer who had a surplus of cattle and desired a piano might have great difficulty in finding a man who had a surplus piano and who also desired cattle. Even though the farmer liked the piano in question, and even though the owner of the piano were pleased with the farmer's cattle, it might be impossible to measure the ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... lovely little villas and summer houses, these all hurriedly deserted by the necessities of war—the furniture and fixtures left all in place as the owners took their hastened departure. In one house we visited was left a handsome piano, on which those who could perform gave the soldiers ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... thousand, a million, ten millions? There is no possibility of heaven except as people are in perfect accord with the divine law and the divine life; for that is what heaven means. You can no more get heaven out of a disordered character than you can get music out of a disordered piano. This salvation which we preach is the constituent element of life. You cannot have a circle if you break the conditions of a circle. You cannot have a river if you break the conditions the very existence of which constitutes a river. So of anything in God's natural world. There are certain essential ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... I hope, to tell the Board to get rid of their latest craze. You'll hardly believe it," she went on, turning to 'Bias, "but I happened to pass the Girls' School the other day, and if there wasn't a piano going!—yes, actually a piano! When you come to think that the parents of some of those children don't earn ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... he was incapable of understanding the tricks that the contemporary masters had introduced into Catholic art. And he had not studied music with that passion which had led him towards painting and letters. He played indifferently on the piano and after many painful attempts had succeeded in reading a score, but he was ignorant of harmony, of the technique needed really to understand a nuance, to appreciate a finesse, to savor a refinement ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... intellect alone opens to the mind the existence of evils which are intensified by the difficulty of their removal, and on which the mind dwells with feelings kindred to despair. I have sometimes doubted whether an obscure farmer's daughter is any happier with her piano, and her piles of cheaply illustrated literature and translations of French novels, and her smatterings of science learned in normal schools, since she has learned too often to despise her father and mother and brother, and her uneducated ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... little leisure for a scene; for I had placed both my other models in position together and I was pegging away at a drawing from which I hoped to derive glory. It had been suggested by the passage in -which Rutland Ramsay, drawing up a chair to Artemisia's piano-stool, says extraordinary things to her while she ostensibly fingers out a difficult piece of music. I had done Miss Churm at the piano before—it was an attitude in which she knew how to take on an absolutely poetic grace. I wished the two figures to "compose" together ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... moment upon the keyboard of the piano before which she was seated, awaiting Lessingham's arrival. Then she glanced at the clock. It was ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Navajo rugs covered the floor and hung on the walls. The skin of a silver-tip bear was stretched beneath a writing desk, a trophy of Arlie's rifle, which hung in a rack above. Civilization had furnished its quota to the room in a piano, some ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... a stove, bookshelves, side-board, piano, and all the comforts of a city residence, and will be drawn by ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... dissatisfied lot! Gershom to-night complained that his own name of "Gershom Binks" impressed him as about the ugliest name that was ever hitched on to a scholar and a gentlemen. And later on, after I'd opened my piano and tried to console myself with a tu'penny draught of Grieg, he inspected the instrument and informed me that it was really evolved from the six-stringed harps of the fourth Egyptian dynasty, which in the fifth dynasty was made with a greatly enlarged base, thus ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... that she has been a hypocrite,—it is that she is a transmigration. You marry a girl for her accomplishments. She paints charmingly, or plays like Saint Cecilia. Clap a ring on her finger, and she never draws again,—except perhaps your caricature on the back of a letter,—and never opens a piano after the honeymoon. You marry her for her sweet temper; and next year, her nerves are so shattered that you can't contradict her but you are whirled into a storm of hysterics. You marry her because she declares she hates balls and likes quiet; and ten to one but what she ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... war in most cases, was begun too nearly at the point where New England education had ended. Let me illustrate. One of the saddest sights I ever saw was the placing of a three hundred dollar rosewood piano in a country school in the South that was located in the midst of the "Black Belt." Am I arguing against the teaching of instrumental music to the Negroes in that community? Not at all; only I should have deferred those music lessons about twenty-five years. There are numbers of ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington
... piano keys!" exclaimed Mr. Damon, "if I can get just one elephant, and pull out his big ivory teeth, I'll be satisfied. I want a nice pair of tusks to set up on either side of my ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... An old battered piano which he had used was also shown. This is the only article which belonged to him that is known to exist, as he died in extreme poverty. It seems sad that his genius was not properly appreciated until after his death, and that he who was to give so much to the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 17, March 4, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... was raised, and the violin Quivered and shook with the strain it bore, While the swelling forth of the sounds within Rose with a sweetness unknown before, And the chords fell soft and low. Piano! ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... myself to arrange them. What would be the use of the man if I did?" This view of the question struck Carmina dumb. Mrs. Gallilee went on. "By-the-by, talking of flowers reminds one of other superfluities. Have you tried the piano in your ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... replaced him in his chair. Now he was no longer a weak and decrepit old man; he felt strong and active, and he hastened forward with a rapid step through the orchestra toward the conductor's seat and the piano in front of it. He laid his hands, which trembled no longer, on the keys, and struck a full concord. He turned his face toward the imperial box; his eyes beamed with love and exultation, and he began to play his favorite hymn ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... her journal, "I have had the great honour to show my talent, or rather my ignorance, on the piano before the Queen. In my youth I had been a tolerable musician, but, alas, that was long ago. For thirty years I had forgotten the instrument. Who would ever have thought that I should one day be summoned to perform before a queen and her court, and at the age of sixty, when I fumbled more ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... ever visit our home (they lived just inside the village in a quaint old manor house I had often admired), we would consider it an honor indeed to entertain Monsieur le Chaplain and his friends," then naively adding, as if by way of further inducement, "we have the only piano in the village." ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... consideration of the design of furniture. Messrs. Broadwood's Grand Pianoforte (illustrated) was a rich example of decorative woodwork in ebony and gold, and may be compared with the illustration on p. 172 of a harpsichord, which the Piano had replaced about 1767, and which at and since the time of the 1851 Exhibition supplies evidence of the increased attention devoted to decorative furniture. In the Appendix will be found a short notice of ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... the firearms in the house, filled all vessels with water, and piled blankets here and there to fight fire. Then they made merry. The wife played her piano till after midnight. Whether moved by this show or not, the blacks failed to return, and next day the family escaped ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... in Fitzroy Square was behaving very well indeed: the rent would be ready by quarter-day, and there were several things in the house that he would be pleased if Mrs. Clair could take away: the piano, for instance; he would consider it a real kindness if she could remove that, he had no use whatever for it, and had a case of rare butterflies that would stand very comfortably in its place. So the instrument ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... out, and mother is going to a bridge party. I have an engagement, so here's the key. When you leave the flat, put it on the hall stand. Sophronia and mother will be back before I am, and they will let me in. I'll leave the centerpiece on the piano." ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... knew well that they were only waiting for him to depart to break forth into excited comments; and presently he heard the phrase, "What assurance!" followed by a lull, as if some one had made a cautioning gesture. Then the somewhat dilapidated piano began to tinkle, as it could tinkle only under the mincing fingers of Mrs. Parr. Had her random notes been given a name, they might have been called Mrs. Parr's Tale of a ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... the "Banner" Club—an organization of social intent, but with political streaks—were a blaze of light that Christmas Eve night. On the lower floor some one was strumming on the piano, and upstairs, where the "ladies" sat, and where the Sunday smokers were held, a man was singing one of the latest coon songs. The "Banner" always got them first, mainly because the composers went there, and often the air of the piece itself had been picked out or patched together, ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... been able to corner Rose-Marie. But at the entertainment they were placed, by the hand of circumstance, upon a wooden settee in the back of the room. And there, for the better part of two hours—while Katie Syrop declaimed poetry and Helen Merskovsky played upon the piano, and others recited long and monotonous dialogues—they were forced ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... of a piano was heard, and Standard Six set off hollowly down the big room. The boys had entered by another door. The piano played on, a march tune, Standard Five followed to the door of the big room. Mr. Harby was seen away beyond at his desk. Mr. Brunt guarded the other door of the room. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... the great table, as a fixture, in the centre, but that of Eve, somewhat shorter, but of equal width, was free from all encumbrance of the sort. It had its sofas, cushions, mirrors, stools, tables, and an upright piano. The doors of the state-rooms, and other conveniences, opened on its sides and ends. In short, it presented, at that hour, the resemblance of a tasteful boudoir, rather than that of an apartment in a cramped ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... than this pretty town of suburban villas and orderly machine shops; with the muddy river for a street and the impenetrable jungle for a back yard. The home of the director at Dima is the proud boast of the entire Congo. And all they say of it is true. It did have a billiard table and ice, and a piano, and M. Fumiere invited me to join his friends at an excellent dinner. In furnishing this celebrated house, the idea had apparently been to place in it the things one would least expect to find in the jungle, or, without wishing to be ungracious, ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... too, in his own way; then he would have her join in the dancing, and bade Ellen Chauncey give her lessons. There was a little backwardness at first, and then Ellen was jumping away with the rest, and thinking it perfectly delightful, as Miss Sophia's piano rattled out merry jigs and tunes, and little feet flew over the floor as light as the hearts they belonged to. At eight o'clock the young ones were dismissed, and bade good-night to their elders; and pleased with the kind kiss Mrs. Marshman had given ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... young fellow who has stood behind her chair for six months, turned over her music, or accompanied her through a few liquorish airs, vows his tender passion, brings her the last new song, and at length swears to be her accompaniment throughout life. The piano is then locked up, the music sent to Bath or Canterbury, and the lady is married and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... take joy in it," Cleek replied. "But why should we talk of unpleasant things when the future looks so bright? Come, may we not give ourselves a pleasant evening? Look, there is a piano, and—— Count, hold my puppy for me, and please see that no one feeds him at any time. I am starving him so that he may devour some of Clopin's parakeets, because I hate the sight of the little beasts. Thank you. Madame, do you like music? Listen, then; I'll sing you Mauravania's ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... to him, "you must ricollect you ain't at home. What 'ud yo' pa think?" Then she stopped suddenly, and Joe gulped his beer and Kitty went to the piano to relieve her embarrassment. ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... brass instruments, very effective, especially in the open air, though a little trying to nervous ladies in the front rows of an opera-house. This is the celebrated "KilkennischeKatzenMotiv" (Motive of Mortal Combat). It is a syncopated movement, and when given at the piano, is to be played furiously, first with one hand and then with the other, till the performer is ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Doggie Trevor began to feel appreciated. He could play the piano, the harp, the viola, the flute, and the clarionette, and sing a mild tenor. Besides music, Doggie had other accomplishments. He could choose the exact shade of silk for a drawing-room sofa cushion, and he had an excellent ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... look as would have turned a mahogany piano leg into a mound of smoking ashes, and slammed the key ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... tendency toward skeleton keys; ingenious upholsterers who indulged in paper-hanging on the sly; shoemakers who did half-soling and heeling, their day's work set to dry on the window-sill, not to mention those addicted to the use of the piano, banjo, or harp, as well as the wig and dress makers who lightened the ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... appropriate setting, and that the splendid apartment could not have been put to a more fitting use. Even the simple religious songs used at the beginning and close of the meetings were accompanied upon a grand piano of finest tone, whose richly inlaid case represented the expenditure of a moderate fortune. Mrs. Van Horne could command the best amateur musical talent, so that the little emotional Moody-and-Sankeys that Mrs. Frankland selected were so overlaid and glorified in ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... speak, or our throats to sing, and declare in a loud voice and with extended throat what we have completely said or sung to ourselves; or if we should stretch out and will to stretch out our hands to touch the notes of the piano, or to take up the brushes and the chisel, making thus in detail those movements which we have already done rapidly, and doing so in such a way as to leave more or less durable traces; this is all an addition, a fact which obeys quite different laws to the first, and with these laws we ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... the sixteenth week had become as rapid and certain as a reflex. At eight months, or a year before its first attempts at speaking, the infant distinguished between a tone and a noise, as shown by its pleasure on hearing the sounds of a piano; after the first year the child found satisfaction in itself striking the piano. In the twenty-first month it danced to music, and in the twenty fourth imitated song; but it is stated on the authority of other observers that some children have been able to sing pitch correctly, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... were wafted in. His house was a once fashionable mansion now cut up into flats. He had what were once the servants' quarters under the roof, three rooms and a bathroom. The windows of his front room looked out on the tops of trees. Here he worked. The room contained nothing but a table, a chair, a piano, and ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... present employment of labor? No, it is not. Luxuries and comforts are of course the objects of human wants; but a desire alone, without purchasing power, can not either buy or produce these commodities. To obtain a piano, one must produce goods, and this implies the possession of capital, by which to bring into existence goods, or purchasing power, to be offered for a piano. Nor is this sufficient. Even after a man, A, for example, offers purchasing ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... very much read. On several tables, among photographs and vases of flowers, were more books and many magazines, both English and foreign. A large writing-table was littered with notes and letters. An upright grand-piano stood open, with a quantity of music upon it. On the thick Persian carpet before the fire was stretched a very large St. Bernard dog, with his muzzle resting on his paws and his eyes blinking ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the drawing-room, which had been transformed into an impromptu ball-room by taking up the rugs and moving the piano to one end of it, ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... came from a small five-toed animal, not much larger than a rabbit. The piano and the gun are brother and sister, born of the bow and arrow, yet how different the children ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... of the night, and graciously said that perhaps that very prima donna would make amends, to him for his absence on the occasion. Vittoria checked a movement of revolt in her frame. She cast an involuntary look at Wilfrid. "Now it begins," she thought, and went to the piano: she had previously refused to sing. Wilfrid had to bend his head over his betrothed and listen to her whisperings. He did so, carelessly swaying his hand to the measure of the aria, with an increasing bitter comparison of the two voices. Lena persisted ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... instantly asked the young ladies to sing. Launce, in obedience to a sign from Natalie, volunteered to find the music-books. It is needless to add that he pitched on the wrong volume at starting. As he lifted it from the piano to take it back to the stand, there dropped out from between the leaves a printed letter, looking like a circular. One of the young ladies took it up, and ran her eye ...
— Miss or Mrs.? • Wilkie Collins
... language. Let their awful presences shame and transfigure, terrify and transport us, into reality of communication akin to their own! "I will express myself in music to you," said a great composer to a bereft woman, as he took his seat at the piano. He felt that he could not manifest otherwise the feeling in him that was so deep. By sound or by silence, let it be only the conviction of our heart we venture to offer to spirits before whom the meaning of all things ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... that room crowded with redolent humanity to hear an absurd little man string together vivid, gross words about religion, words that made me tingle all over," I answered as I threw my coat on a chair, lifted my hat from my head and sat down on the seat before the dark old piano. "I think religion is the most awful thing in the world and I am as afraid of it as I am of—of death. I'm going ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Wall to the head of the set, other children rushed for places, Mrs. Legrange seated herself at the piano, and the merry dance went on; but, when it was over, Minnie Wall returned to Mrs. Legrange's side, followed by two or three more, begging her to play the cachuca, and see how nicely 'Toinette could dance it. Half unwillingly the mother complied, and found really astonished as she noticed the ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... say. Look at the perfect polish of that table! It's like the finish of a rosewood piano." He touched ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... every day a young girl who seems to have no special gift. Her delicate health has prevented her from studying much, so although the wealth and position of her family have made it possible for her to have the best teachers all her life, her education is not far advanced. With all her piano lessons she will stumble over the simplest march if any one is listening to her; she replies to her French teacher in monosyllables; she has read few books: and as for her arithmetic, children in the primary schools could put her to shame. Nevertheless, she ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... lace on to make it a bit higher. Now I'm sorry I did, for I had to put in those snap fasteners instead of hooks. And if you don't get them to fit exactly they come loose. It's like when the film doesn't come right on the screen, and the piano player sounds a discord to call the operator's ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... happy and musical Fatherland, was just packing up its music stands some fifty yards lower down the street; whilst, as he mounted the steps of the house, two Dagos appeared round the next corner, trundling a piano organ, on the top of which was seated what was apparently a small and long-tailed relative of their own. His rooms, however—two on the first floor—though small, were quite cheerful for their kind, whilst the meat tea, which the landlady presently brought up, ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... them, and in splendid Chinese cages, birds of gorgeous plumage have learned to caress the rosy lips of their young mistress, or perch triumphantly on her snowy finger. Here are books, too, and music—a harp—a piano—while through a half open door leading from a little recess over which a multaflora is taught to twine its graceful tendrils, a glimpse may be caught of rosy silken hangings shading the couch where the queen of this little realm nightly ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... with a few hair raisers of his own invention, one of which consisted of apparently letting go the rope by accident and shooting skyward with a wild shriek, only to be caught at the end of a fine, especially woven piano wire cable attached to a spring safety belt, the cable being in turn fastened into ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... was only half finished when they chose me for the big plunge," he said. "Of course I was doing a lot of conducting then, too. Now I'd much rather just write." He hurried across the long, softly-lit room to the piano, came back with a sheaf of papers. "Do you read music? This is just what I've been doing recently. Can't get it quite right, ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... well expect An Influenza-cure from Demogorgon! Some dolts there be, no doubt, who would detect Anodyne influence in a barrel-organ; A febrifuge in a flat German Band, A prophylactic in a street-piano! Some quackery a man can understand, But Music I'll not take, even cum grano. I don't believe what classic noodles say, That Music stopped the haemorrhage of ULYSSES; That CATO'S stiffened joints attained free play From harmony ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. July 4, 1891 • Various
... with one beating-stick, with which any one may keep time, is, I suppose, the sort of music most classes in gymnastics will use at first. And it has advantages. While it is less pleasing than some other instruments, it secures more perfect concert than any other. The violin and piano are excellent, but on some accounts the hand-organ is the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... Lenox, if you had asked him whether Ormuzd was at peace with all the world, he would have retired into himself, for he hadn't the faintest idea. As for music, or any fine art, he never approached it but once, when he led me to the piano, begging for some native American melody, and not a German romance. Well, I played him 'God save the Queen,' with extravagant variations, which he took for 'Yankee Doodle.' No matter! I made a mistake when I spoke of his opinions; he hadn't any. He was what some call ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... unacknowledged longing possessed him to see how she would carry herself now. He caught up the book he had come for, and went downstairs to the piazza. Sylvia had vanished. Disappointed, he went back into the house. Straying to the piano, he sat down and began to play a Chopin prelude. It was John's one and only instrumental achievement, learned by ear, and dug out of the ivories, as one might say, by long hours of laborious ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... mother were awful rich. They brought her home in a great big ship! And gave her twelve new dresses and the front parlor and a brown piano! But she wouldn't stay in any of them! All she'd stay in was a little old blue silk dress she'd had before ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... charm for Sunny, and after a rather long ride, got out at a cross street and walked until they reached a narrow, five-storied brick house with gay window boxes at every window. A maid opened the door for them and showed them into a pleasant, rather small room where a little girl sat at the grand piano, practicing. ...
— Sunny Boy in the Big City • Ramy Allison White
... seated in front of him. Between the speeches the ladies burst forth into a sort of plaintive ditty. The party was entertained by a band of musicians, consisting of three drummers and four performers on the marimba, a species of piano. It consists of two bars of wood placed side by side; across these are fixed fifteen wooden keys, each two or three inches broad and about eighteen long, their thickness being regulated by the deepness of the note required. Each of the keys has a calabash ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... occupation with the sheep, he found time to play the piano, to read and to write. In the library of St. John's College, Cambridge, are two copies of the Greek Testament, very fully annotated by him at the University and in the colony. He also read the Origin of Species, which, as everyone knows, was published in 1859. He became "one ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones
... coffee, or Rhine wine, or Tokay, or perhaps something stronger," asked Raffles Haw, stretching out his hand to what looked like a piano-board projecting from the wall. "I can recommend the Tokay. I have it from the man who supplies the Emperor of Austria, though I think I may say that I get the ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in the far distance, and the mysterious purple gloom which, like a rich robe, covered the intervening hills. By some strange coincidence the subject of music came up, and P. bitterly lamented the absence of that gentle muse from such grand surroundings. I don't believe there is a piano in the country except at the girls' school at Cetinje. The Scotchman had suggested the gusla as a substitute, and had been met with derisive laughter, for he had made the suggestion in all good faith. He was one of the most ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... interest as De Luxe Dora, unaccompanied for once, swept into the place. Dora was gorgeously and flashily dressed and fairly scintillated with jewels. She seated herself not far from the door and ordered a cocktail. Then she whistled a bar of music suggestively to the piano-player, who immediately caught it, and the "orchestra" with a show of animation strummed out her suggestion. She sent over drinks for them and was rewarded with ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... of the quarter-deck a stage had been hurriedly constructed—a rude affair of planks and spars that could be disposed of in a very few moments if necessity arose—that supported a piano. A canvas screen, stretched between two stanchions behind the stage, did duty as scenery, and afforded the performers a "green-room"—for, of all the ritual connected with appearing upon a stage, the ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... vertic rays of Summer Homeward came the fair Miranda. How the village people wonder'd At her fashions, and her movements, How she made the new piano Tremble to its inmost centre With andante, and bravura, What a piece she had to show them Of Andromache the Trojan, Wrought in silks of every color, And 'twas said a foreign language Such as princes use in Paris, She could speak ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... chords from the piano melted into a rippling prelude, and Winifred breathed easier when her friend began to sing. Her voice was sweet and excellently trained, and there was a deep stillness of appreciation when the clear ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... at the Black Cat—a real pianist, not just a person who plays the piano. She is a striking figure in a quaint, tunic-like dress, greying hair and a keen face, and a personal friend of half the frequenters. She has an uncanny instinct for the psychology of the moment. She knows just when "Columbia" will be the proper thing to play, and when the ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... at the piano and played a few bars softly to himself—a beautiful, airy sort of melody, as it shaped itself vaguely in his head at the moment, with a little of the new wine of first love running like a trill through the midst of its fast-flowing quavers and dainty ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... treasures associated with dear memories she would gladly have taken, but a strict sense of honor forbade her. She turned away, locking the door, but leaving the key in it, to be turned next by a stranger's hand. She drew up her music stool, and seating herself upon it touched the keys of her piano with a skillful hand, and ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... the point of ringing to send a question to her room, when this purpose quickly yielded to an unexpected sound—the sound of low music proceeding apparently from the saloon. She knew her aunt never touched the piano, and the musician was therefore probably Ralph, who played for his own amusement. That he should have resorted to this recreation at the present time indicated apparently that his anxiety about his ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... fairly well-educated, up-to-date young woman with whom a friendly flirtation was just what it was with white womankind—the pleasant amusement of an hour or season. It was a mistake—a very big mistake. Tannis understood something of piano playing, something less of grammar and Latin, and something less still of social prevarications. But she understood absolutely nothing of flirtation. You can never get an Indian to ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... turned away her own and walked towards the piano, stopping on the way, however, to push forward a little table set forth with a steaming tea-urn and cups, matches and a tray, and to lift to its farther edge a bowl of heavy-scented violets. Her every motion was full of ministry, as ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... evenings together at Yule, with charades and punning contests, and music on the piano which Lincoln Lang had brought out through the gumbo against all the protests of nature. Mrs. Lang was an admirable cook and a liberal and hospitable hostess, which was an added reason for ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... the whole family adjourned to the parlor and were entertained with some good old-fashioned piano playing and homespun duets and solos. The veterans added their mite to the entertainment in the shape of a tolerably fair tenor and an intolerable bass. Singing in the open air, with a male chorus, is not the best preparation ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... woman court clavier player. Scarlatti and Bach. True art of clavier-playing. Sonata form. Where Haydn gained much. Mozart and Clementi. Pianoforte and improvements. Viennese school. Clementi school. Giant on lofty heights. Oscar Bie on Beethoven. Golden age of pianoforte. Piano composers and virtuosi, from Weber to the present time. Teachers and ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... glance, the beautiful girl began to read the will. Shawn leaned against the old piano and buried his face in his hands. Presently he felt two soft arms steal about his neck and a gentle voice saying, "Shawn, would it be the nobler course of a love that should change or turn against one, who was in no way responsible for the conditions of birth; to ...
— Shawn of Skarrow • James Tandy Ellis
... would return to civilization, for he would have her to live for. He would build a home for her, with a garden and dogs and birds and flowers. With his silver-claim money he had fifteen thousand dollars laid away, and she would never know what it meant to be poor. He would educate her and buy her a piano and she would have no end of pretty dresses and things to make her a lady. They would be together and inseparable always, and when she grew up he prayed deep down in his soul that she would be like the older Isobel, ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... love her because she goes to the altar with her head full of book learning, her hands of no earthly use, save for the piano and brush; because she has no conception of the duties and responsibilities of a wife; because she hates housework, hates its everlasting routine and ever recurring duties; because she hates children and will adopt every ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... matter rather badly, but I suppose the most consummate tact on my part would not have changed things. I should have waited until I saw her alone, or until the party was breaking up; but I went directly I saw they had stopped dancing. She was leaning on the piano and letting Herbert fan her, and looking almost too beautiful for real life as she turned her face toward him, flushed with her exercise and beaming with excitement. There was something grand to me in the expression of individuality and proud insistence that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... may truly be called natural, as it is that into which the string naturally divides itself when stricken. An attentive ear can readily distinguish the succession of sounds as far as the small seventh. The longer bass strings of any piano of full tone and resonant sounding board will suffice for the experiment. These are also the natural notes as found, with differences in compass, in the simple horn and trumpet, and the phenomenon is visibly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... corn-husks and pumpkins on the barn floor, and dance by the light of tin lanterns. At least, that's the traditional thing. The actual thing is sitting around four sides of the room, giggling, whispering, looking at photograph albums, and coaxing somebody to play on the piano. The banquet is passed in the form of apples and water. I have assisted at some rural festivals where the apples were omitted. Upon the whole, I wonder our country people don't all go mad. They ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... Majoral, reaching down to the kernel of the matter, solved the difficulty with the question: "Have we the piano?" ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... fourteen"—or such of them as were old enough to hope and discuss their hopes—talked over their golden future. The tall grown girls whispered to each other of possible Barchester parties, of possible allowances for dress, of a possible piano—the one they had in the vicarage was so weather-beaten with the storms of years and children as to be no longer worthy of the name—of the pretty garden, and the pretty house. 'Twas of such things it most behoved them ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... grace" were found, was inaccessible to Light. In both classes he found free scope for his doctrine of Delicacy, one day remonstrating with a correspondent for "living in a place with the absurd, and worse, name of 'Marine Retreat'"; another, preaching that "a piano in a Quaker's drawing-room is a step for him to more humane life;" and again "liking and respecting polite tastes in a grandee," when Lord Ravensworth consulted him about Latin verses. "At present far too many of Lord Ravensworth's class are mere men of business, or mere farmers, or mere horse-racers, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... their houses so that they could go and lay their hands on it in the darkest night. I'll bet they could in our house. From end to end it is kept looking as if we had shut it up and gone to Europe,—not a book, not a paper, not a glove, or any trace of a human being in sight; the piano shut tight, the bookcases shut and locked, the engravings locked up, all the drawers and closets locked. Why, if I want to take a fellow into the library, in the first place it smells like a vault, and I have to unbarricade windows, and unlock ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... overlooking the street from a projecting balcony, was the reading-room. This was a high, cool, spacious apartment comfortably furnished with easy-chairs, pictures, maps, hanging book-cases, a big library table covered with periodicals, and an American piano. The periodicals were not of very recent date, and the piano was somewhat out of tune, but I was so delighted with the shady, flower-bordered courtyard and the comfort and apparent cleanliness of the club as a whole that I felt no ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... he turned (the doctor noted) he bent an inscrutable look of pain on Nora. He sat down at the piano and struck a wild, sad chord. Instantly it became as if the people in the room were the instrument upon which he played,—as if the throbbing human hearts around him were directly connected by invisible strings with the ivory keys that pulsed beneath his fingers. What ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... pity there is no piano," said Loiseau as a crowning point to the situation, "we might have finished ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... dawning when we left Delianuova and began the long and weary climb up Montalto. Chestnuts gave way to beeches, but the summit receded ever further from us. And even before reaching the uplands, the so-called Piano di Carmelia, we encountered a bank of bad weather. A glance at the map will show that Montalto must be a cloud-gatherer, drawing to its flanks every wreath of vapour that rises from Ionian and Tyrrhenian; a west wind was blowing that morning, and thick fogs clung to the skirts of the peak. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... eats in my sleep. I want some more Childs' bucks. I want to see the electrics winking on the roofs. I want to smell wet asphalt and see the taxis whizzing by in the rain. I want to see a seven-foot Mick cop with a back like a piano-box and a paw like a ham and a foot like a submarine with stove-polish on it. I want to see the subway in the rush hour and the dips and mollbuzzers going through the crowd like kids in a berry patch. I want to see a ninety-story ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... about to be very advantageously married to a young gentleman who dealt in coals and played the violin (for N——- was a very musical town), had just joined her for the purpose of extorting "The Swiss Boy, with variations," out of a sleepy little piano, that emitted a very painful cry under the awakening fingers ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... sympathetic helper. Of her own accord she took to poetry and music. In effect, had Doris Martin attended the best of boarding-schools and training colleges, she would have received a smattering of French and a fair knowledge of the piano or violin, whereas, after more humble tuition, it might fairly be said of her that few girls of her age had read so many books and assimilated their contents so thoroughly. From her mother she inherited her good looks and a small yearly income, just sufficient to ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... he possessed, must be noticed here, for, with a lifetime's experience of dogs, no parallel can be recalled, or has been gatherable elsewhere. First of all, he was certainly musical, and often after a long day's work, when the landscape outside was wintry, dreary, and wet, and the piano was thrown open and thrashed for joy of sound and relief, Murphy would rise from his mat and come and lie close to his master's feet. He did not sing or howl on these occasions, in the way that with many dogs conveys the impression ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... and two footstools. A settee, with a small round table in front of it, fills the upper right-hand corner. In front, on the left, a little way from the wall, a sofa. Further back than the glass door, a piano. On either side of the doorway at the back a whatnot with terra-cotta and majolica ornaments.— Against the back wall of the inner room a sofa, with a table, and one or two chairs. Over the sofa hangs the portrait of a handsome ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... appeared with his bag in his hand. She inquired, with great simplicity, where he was going. He told her he was going away. She remonstrated, first tenderly, then almost angrily. "We all counted on you to play the violin. We can't dance to the piano alone." ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... accompany the hymns, but, since the rolls were scored rather for musical effect than for church services, the pianola was suddenly found to be playing something quite different from what was being sung. All through the expedition the want of some one who could play the piano was felt, and such a man is certainly a great asset in a life so far removed from all the pleasures of civilization. As Scott wrote in The Voyage of the Discovery, where one of the officers used to play each evening: "This hour of music has become an institution which none of ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... in the room where Dunk and Andy sat. Now and then, from some room would come the tinkle of a piano, or the hum ...
— Andy at Yale - The Great Quadrangle Mystery • Roy Eliot Stokes
... little, there arrived in town a vaulted box, in which the dullest fancy might conjecture a piano. Greatly indeed were heads shaken. If doom were easily invoked, Jane would hardly have lived to unpack the treasure and help to lift it ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... mind. Perhaps you have fallen to Miss Pennycuick's piano? Did you hear it going as we passed ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... was lounging in the drawing-room, drinking in the strains of a Chopin Nocturne. Not only were his ears gladdened by romantic music, but his eyes were equally exercised by the radiant figure of Angela, bending over the piano, with the red-shaded lights throwing her bare shoulders into perspective and turning her hair to liquid gold. The nocturne ended, she swung ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... at last, letting her gaze wander vaguely over the music-room, about which the other guests were seated. They were lined on gilded settees against the white French-paneled walls, while a young man played Chopin's Ballade in A flat on a grand piano in the far corner. Not being in the music-room itself, but in the large, square hall outside, the two young people could talk in low tones without disturbing the company. If she betrayed emotion it ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... until late in autumn, a large, black hunting spider (Lycosa) dwelt in my piano. When I played andante movements softly, she would come out on the music rack and seem to listen intently. Her palpi would vibrate with almost inconceivable rapidity, while every now and then she would lift her ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... briskly, and in a few minutes came to the tavern. The door was shut, the weather being cold, but I knew by the lights shining through the windows that a hospitable fire was burning on the hearth. There was no need to knock at the door. I heard the jangling piano playing an accompaniment to the flute-like whistling of Harry Herndon's negro. Remembering his carelessness, I felt like going into the tavern and giving him a frailing. The inclination was so strong that I held my hand on the door-knob until the first flush of anger ...
— A Little Union Scout • Joel Chandler Harris
... made her aware of Peters standing beside her. He looked down silently on the card table for a few moments, pointed with a nicotine-stained finger to a move Miss Craven had missed and then wandered across the room and sat down at the piano. For a while his hands moved silently over the keys, then he began to play, and his playing was exquisite. Gillian sat and marvelled. Peters and music had seemed widely apart. He had appeared so essentially a sportsman; in spite of the literary tendency ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... with red, and the chairs and lounges were deep and comfortable. A large davenport stood before the fireplace, which had been rebuilt for logs. There was a victrola in one corner, for Miss Dwight was amenable if her guests were seized with the desire to jazz, and a grand piano stood near the lower windows. The only evidence of sheer femininity was a tea table furnished with old pieces of silver she had picked up in France. The dining-room below was a trifle gayer in effect; the ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... loyalty to the British Empire became too fervent to be restrained within the bounds of decency. "Remnants" of red, white and blue were ostentatiously sewn into a distant resemblance of the British flag; the parlour piano once more did its often unsatisfactory best with the British anthem; mamma's darling received strict injunctions not to play with that horrid little Dutch boy next door; and papa, jingling the sovereigns ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... the point. I am not a man of education. I don't know how to play the piano, and can scarcely manage a free-hand sketch of a cathedral. My Greek is shaky, and I speak French and German with an accent enough to drive a linguist mad. No, no, you take my word for it—this little incident ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... hesitated—but I cannot feel sure that I observed him correctly. It matters little. With or without hesitation, he followed her to the piano. ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... curls round her head." The abundance of her curling hair caused her much trouble, and she once cut it off, as Maggie Tulliver did, because it would not "lie straight." "One of her school-fellows," we are told, "recalls that the first time she sat down to the piano she astonished her companions by the knowledge of music she had already acquired. She mastered her lessons with an ease which excited wonder. She read with avidity. She joined very rarely in the sports of her companions, and her diffidence and shrinking ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... have made two score before the dancing began. Twenty floating visions—each male and female. Twenty women, knit and growing to as many men, undulate, sway, and swirl giddily before us, keeping time with the delirious melody of piano, harp, and violin. ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... sostenuto piano has been the dream of many a musician whose ardent desire it was to perform his music exactly as it was written. A sustained piano note is, indeed, the great mechanical desideratum for the music of the future. In music, as at present written and published for the piano, which is, and must ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... for a couple of decanters, water-jug and glasses. The glitter of these things caught my eye first; but what I saw next was the captain down there, alone as far as I could see; and I could see pretty well the whole of that part up to the cottage piano, dark against the satin-wood panelling of the bulkhead. And I remained looking. I did. And I don't know that I was ashamed of myself either, then. It was the fault of that Franklin, always talking of the man, making free with him to that extent that really he seemed to have ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... centre and were lashed to opposite sides of the triangle that served as a mast for the stay-wires that guyed the wings. The four ribs of each wing, enclosed in pockets in the fabric, radiated fanwise from the centre, and were each stayed by three steel piano-wires to the top of the triangular mast, and similarly to its base. These ribs were bolted down to the triangle at their roots, and could be easily folded back on to the body when the glider was not in use. A small fixed vertical surface was carried in the rear. The framework and ribs were ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... at Amsterdam, there was placed in the apartments of the Empress a piano so constructed as to appear like a desk with a division in the middle, and in this space was placed a small bust of the Emperor of Russia. Soon after, the Emperor wished to see if the apartments of the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... you mean she sings, it's a shame I haven't got a piano," Miss Birdseye took upon herself to respond. It came back to her that the girl had ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... enjoy "Can a Little Child Like Me," "Brightly Gleams Our Banner," "Jesus Loves Me." "I Think When I Read That Sweet Story," and "For the Beauty of the Earth," though they will join gladly in the other hymns. Or, instead of using the phonograph, sit down quietly at the piano and play these hymns, with just enough emphasis for the children to catch the rhythm, and they will soon be standing at the piano ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... herself, with the others, sitting very quiet and listening to two girls playing a duet on the piano. Then one of them sang a Scotch song. There was warmth and richness, the warbling of birds, the melody of brooks, in the rendering, and Bernice heard a half-sigh close ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... comfortable in the corral, reasoning that if he were going to be watched, he would be watched no matter where he went; but he ate his supper in the dining room of the Plaza Hotel, and sat in the lobby talking with a couple of facetious drummers until the mechanical piano in the movie show across ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... for supper at the house of Colonel Bacon, an old man and Secessionist. The Colonel treated us politely, but while we were eating a number of ladies of the town assembled in an adjoining parlor in which there was a piano, threw the communicating door open, and proceeded to sing such Confederate war-songs as Stonewall Jackson's Away and My Maryland. We of course accepted good humoredly this concert for our benefit, but when we had finished supper, uninvited, ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... magnitude, having to do with transactions which involve a daily expenditure of upward of $800,000. Fortunately, indeed, the stupendous progress of mechanic art in modern times makes it comparatively easy. Thanks to the Piano Electro-Reckoner, the most complex calculations can be made in a few seconds. In two hours Mr. Smith completed his task. Just in time. Scarcely had he turned over the last page when Dr. Wilkins arrived. After him came the body of Dr. Faithburn, escorted by a numerous ...
— In the Year 2889 • Jules Verne and Michel Verne
... left the room. After tripping gaily down the village street at Alois's urgent invitation, Pearl consented to visit the Eldon Maise mansion. The beautiful home captivated the orphan whose life in the circus had deprived her of all real comfort such as she saw here. But it was before the piano that she paused the longest. And when she sang for Alois, that young lady was much gratified to discover that Pearl's singing was as exquisite as the charm of ...
— Pearl and Periwinkle • Anna Graetz
... lit as soon as they got in. Vava had her lessons to do; but after their tea-supper, for which the landlady declined to cook anything but eggs—'London eggs,' as Vava said—Stella looked round for something to do. There was no piano, she had no books, nor was she fond of fancy-work, and of useful work she had none, for 'nursie' had always done most of the mending for her young ladies, though she had taught them both to work. Before they left home she had set their wardrobes in thorough order. ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... went into the drawing-room by themselves, and while she took a seat near the brightly-lit fire-place, he opened the piano at once and sat down. He turned up his cuffs, he took a look at the pedals, he threw back his head, shaking his long brown hair; and then, with a crash like thunder, his two hands struck the keys. He had forgotten all about that sonata: it was a fantasia ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... his own fancy. All this, in a city whose art had been the glory of the world for nigh half a thousand years, struck Ferris as yet more comically pathetic than the frescoed grape-arbor; he stared about him for some sort of escape from the pictures, and his eye fell upon a piano and a melodeon placed end to end in a right angle. Don Ippolito, seeing his look of inquiry, sat down and briefly played the same air with a hand upon ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... of this little room, with dark green walls, only relieved by some engravings and coats of arms, formed a pleasing contrast to Edward's eyes, after the glaring splendor of the other apartments. From behind a piano-forte, at which she had been seated in a recess, rose a tall, slender female form, in a ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... LINTER. Piano solo, 3s.: Duet, 4s. "Another of the admired sets by the author of the Canary Quadrilles and the Goldfinch Quadrilles, elegantly composed, as they ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 214, December 3, 1853 • Various
... struggle, and comfortably conscious that as his residence was "detached," no obtrusive neighbor could either warn him to desist, or set up an opposition nuisance next door by constant practice on the distressingly over-popular piano. One thing very much in his favor was, that he never manifested any desire to perform in public. No one had ever heard him play, . . he pursued his favorite amusement in solitude, and was amply satisfied, if when questioned on the subject of music, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... leaning lightly against a pillar by the fountain. "I never hear a pianist, however great and famous, but I see the little cream-colored hammers within the piano bobbing up and down like acrobatic brownies. I never hear the plaudits of the crowd for the artist and watch him return to bow his thanks, but I mentally demand that these little acrobats, each resting on an individual pedestal, and weary from his efforts, shall appear to receive ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... gave her a significant look. She pushed his hand from her arm and walked to the piano. But there was a wavering, an uncertainty in her face. He had been her comrade so long and she really ...
— The Heart of the Rose • Mabel A. McKee
... great musical talent, and used to amuse himself blowing trumpet calls on his father's French horn, although the instrument was almost as big as himself; he also achieved considerable mastery over the piano, the flute and the violin, but, though bright and intelligent enough, and always maintaining a creditable position at school, it was evident that nature had intended him for a musician, and that he could never succeed in anything prosaic or mechanical. Accordingly his father taught ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... upstairs as gently as possible, while the young ladies, the governess, the maids, are shown to their apartments. The eldest young lady, a slim black-haired young lass of thirteen, frisks about the rooms, looks at all the pictures, runs in and out of the veranda, tries the piano, and bursts out laughing at its wheezy jingle. She also kisses her languid little brother laid on the sofa, and performs a hundred gay and agile ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... sugar candy? Then rub your eyes, you ecclesiastical bats, and let me show you the 'outcome' of all this wise and learned chat, with which you edify one another. You know she beguiled me into giving her lessons on the organ, as well as the piano, and yesterday when I went over to the church at instruction hour, I was astonished at a prelude, which she had evidently improvised. Screened from her view, I listened till she finished playing. Of course I praised her (for really she has remarkable talent), ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... would not have understood me. Probably she would have thought me a fool. And indeed I am inclined to question whether it is an advantage to a maiden's after career to be dewy-roselike in her unsophistication. In order to play tunes indifferently well on the piano she undergoes the weary training of many years; but she is called upon to display the somewhat more important accomplishment of bringing children into the world without an hour's educational preparation. The difficulty ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... the West end of this flat the rooms both front and back are parlours, with folding doors between, so that while one may be used for conversational purposes or such like, the other may be fitted with a piano and also with games, such as chess, draughts, &c. The upper flat, which contains also very handsome rooms, beautifully finished, is divided into two portions, one to be occupied exclusively by the Secretary, and containing dining and drawing rooms divided by folding doors, ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... slowly pale. "Your father," she at last succeeded in articulating. "Ach!" She lifted her arm, thick as a piano leg, and resumed the study of her ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... very erect and ready for argument, watched her steadily from the piano stool of their ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... Freshmen. I've seen nine frats, with a total of one hundred and fifty members, sitting up nights for a week at a time working out plans to despoil each other of a runty little fellow in a pancake hat, whose only accomplishment was playing the piano with his feet. One frat wanted him and ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... the grand piano and set it open; as she did so a thought of Sylvie came across her mind, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... but I had to make a start to get Rosey away from the piano. She's playing while Madge teaches some of the other seniors how to dance the latest step. I wish she'd hurry, I hate loosing my special bus." She glanced behind her and then stopped. "Here she ...
— Phyllis - A Twin • Dorothy Whitehill
... legs and arms in Europe; and her hair seemed to lose its wonderful lustre; and her skin, upon which Mrs. Burton had banked so much, became colorless and opaque and a little blotched around the chin. And she was so nervous and overgrown that she would throw you a whole fit of hysterics during piano lessons; and she prayed so long night and morning that her bony knees developed callouses; and when she didn't have a cold in her head she was getting ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... do my best; but tell Nora to be sure and get the fiddler from Hollymount. It's so stupid for her to be sitting there at the piano while ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... product. That is so as regards the functional products of human evolution. The hand was produced out of the animal forelimb with the primary end of grasping the things we materially need, but as a by-product the hand has developed the function of making and playing the piano and the violin, and that secondary functional by-product of the hand we account, even as measured by the rough test of money, more precious, however less materially necessary, than its primary function. It is, however, only in rare and gifted natures that transformed ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... Andante is going to give us the most trouble, for it is full of expression and must be played with taste and accurately as written in the matter of forte and piano. She is very clever and learns quickly. The right hand is very good but the left utterly ruined. I can say that I often pity her when I see that she is obliged to labor till she gasps, not because she is unapt, but because ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Mrs. Mary R. Scott of Pittsburgh became his teacher. She taught him his letters and first lessons in spelling and reading, giving him considerable time and attention, while the other boys were playing. Perceiving his special fondness for music, she taught him the chords on the piano, and thus gave him a start on that noble instrument, which has ever since been ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... at a corner pub and asked each other in to have a drink while waiting for the hearse. They passed away some of the time dancing jigs to a piano in the bar parlour. They passed away the rest of the ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... enough to know the difference between poverty and riches, I began to lose all interest in my simple home duties, and to cast longing looks at the great school building where girls like myself learned to speak like ladies and play the piano. Yet these ambitious promptings might have come to nothing if I had never met him. I might have settled down in my own sphere and lived a useful if unsatisfied life like my mother and my mother's mother ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... and ends of the cabin were formed of bulkheads, the fore bulkhead being occupied by a sort of sideboard on each side of the entrance door, while against the after bulkhead stood a very handsome pianoforte, open, with a quantity of music in a stand beside it. There was a door to the right of the piano, which, I conjectured, led to the captain's state-room, right abaft; and the side bulkheads, which like the rest of the woodwork of the cabin were painted in white enamel, were each pierced by two doors, close together, which, I had no doubt, ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... shop yesterday; the round rosewood table was in a painfully high state of polish; the morocco-bound picture books that lay on it, looked as if they had never been moved or opened since they had been bought; not one leaf even of the music on the piano was dogs-eared or worn. Never was a richly furnished room more thoroughly comfortless than this—the eye ached at looking round it. There was no repose anywhere. The print of the Queen, hanging lonely on the wall, in its heavy gilt frame, with a large crown at the top, ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... secretary of the A. T. L. A. If you had only come sooner you could have met her. What were you asking? Oh, yes! about Gerald's music. Why, you could no more imagine Gerald without music, than you could think of a bird without wings. He would simply perish without a piano. When we are abroad we rent one if we are only going to be in a place ten days. His Papa can't understand this, but then Mr. Ivy is not musical, poor dear; he really doesn't know a fugue ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... to thumb his nose casually at the entire audience, and then amid shouts and hisses sat down at the piano and began ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... and went back to find the doctor and Helen all smiles, and ready to joke instead of scold. Then he went to the piano, and turned over the music, the airs and songs making him feel more and more sad, and again and again he ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... in their reading, of which there was a good assortment—the daily papers, the magazines and a choice collection of books furnished by the American Library Association. Other groups were intent upon chess or checkers, while in the piano corner were the musically inclined. Sometimes it was a piano or a baritone solo, but most often the boys were singing "Keep the Home Fires Burning," "The Long, Long ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... remembered, or at least found familiar, books she had read, songs she must have sung, drifted into doing a hundred little simple everyday things she must have done before, since they came to her with no effort. She could sew and knit and play the piano exquisitely. But all this seemed rather a trick of the fingers than of the mind. The people, the places, the life that lay behind that crash on the Overland never returned to her consciousness for all her anxious ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... overflowing. The fishing fell off, but there were picnics and camping-parties in abundance, and Jacques was in demand. The ladies liked him; his manners were so pleasant, and they took a great interest in his music. Moody bought a piano for the parlour that summer; and there were two or three good players in the house, to whom Jacques would listen with delight, sitting on a pile of logs outside the parlour windows in ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... coffee after dinner. It was two o'clock, because the steamer going down the lake to Desenzano had bustled through the sunshine, and the rocking of the water still made lights that danced up and down upon the wall among the shadows by the piano. ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... very different feelings, and in very different circumstances. It was one of the angels of the earth—a pure-hearted and very beautiful girl; who, after a day of peaceful, innocent, and charitable employment, and having just quitted the piano, where her exquisite strains had soothed and delighted the feelings of her brother, harassed with political anxieties, had retired to her chamber for the night. A few moments before she was presented to the reader, she had extinguished her taper, and dismissed her maid without her having discharged ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... his pupils with such tiresome things as scales and exercises. His plan was to discover the song the young man fancied himself singing, the particular jingle the young lady yearned to knock out of the piano, and to teach it to them. Was it "Tom Bowling?" Well and good. Come on; follow your leader. The O'Kelly would sing the ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... music, they say. Has a piano and plays Grigg and Chopping, and all that classical kind of music. He went clear down to Denver last year to hear ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... guava jelly and oranges. The walls and ceilings were of native wood, of the kinds used in delicate cabinet-work and were polished until they shone. The floor was covered with fine straw matting, and around the room were ranged easy-chairs and sofas of willow and rattan. In one corner stood a piano in an ebony case, and on a koa-wood centre-table were a number of fine photographs and works of art. Hanging baskets filled with blooming plants hung in each window and in the veranda. Altogether, it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... one who sings madrigals to-night, Uncle; she is going to read Colin a lesson"; and, sitting down at the piano, she let her hands run over the keys and burst out joyously into that variation of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... the sound of the piano and the fiddle in the saloon ceased. One of the waltzes was over, and some of the dancers came upon deck to flirt or to cool themselves. One pair, engaged very obviously in the former occupation, stationed themselves so near to Robert ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... as an orchestra tuning up! And yet by way of modification (as usual) it must be said that appreciation of Western music is growing, and one seldom hears in classical selections a sweeter combination of voice and piano than Mrs. Tamaki Shibata's, while my Japanese student-friend has also surprised me by singing "Suwanee River" and other old-time American favorites ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... musician held upon his breast, in the manner of a violin, and struck it with the other, in good and regular time; the performer, who was a stout strong voiced man, sung the whole time, and frequently applied those graces in music, the piano and forte; he was assisted by several young boys and girls, who sat at his feet, and by their manner of crossing the thighs, made a hollow between them and their belly, upon which they beat time ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... that calf, Evadne, standing by the piano?" Louis put the question to his cousin the next evening, as he sought a few moments' respite from his duties ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... each with his own instrument interprets that life to those less sensitive than himself. Observe a musician composing. He writes; stops; hesitates; meditates; perhaps hums softly to himself; perhaps goes to the piano and strikes a chord or two. What is he doing? He is trying to express to himself a beauty which he has heard in the world of infinite phenomena, and to reproduce it as well as sensuous sounds can reproduce it, that those with duller hearing than himself may ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... nephew; and that the Ghost of Christmas Present knew it. The way he went after that plump sister in the lace tucker, was an outrage on the credulity of human nature. Knocking down the fire-irons, tumbling over the chairs, bumping up against the piano, smothering himself amongst the curtains, wherever she went, there went he! He always knew where the plump sister was. He wouldn't catch anybody else. If you had fallen up against him, (as some of them did) on purpose, he would have ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... into Exeter yesterday. I got there about sunset, transacted my business, and turned to walk home again through the warm twilight. In Southernhay, as I was passing a house of which the ground-floor windows stood open, there sounded the notes of a piano—chords touched by a skilful hand. I checked my step, hoping, and in a minute or two the musician began to play that nocturne of Chopin which I love best—I don't know how to name it. My heart leapt. There I stood in the thickening dusk, the glorious sounds floating about me; and I trembled ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... doorstep in the Broadway. The house was lighted. Through the open windows of the drawing-room poured a musical torrent. Angelica, although but sixteen, shook life and soul from the cold keys of the piano, and was already ambitious to win fame as a composer. To-night she was playing extemporaneously, and Hamilton caught his breath. In the music was the thunder of the hurricane he so often had described to his children, the piercing rattle of the giant castinets [sic], ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... graceful cluster of girls hovering over the piano, and the quiet groups of the elders in easy chairs, around little tables. I cannot hear what is said, nor plainly see the faces. But some hoyden evening wind, more daring than I, abruptly parts the cloud to look in, and out ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... capital of thirty thousand dollars. In three years this sum was increased to four hundred thousand dollars. The new company manufactured India-rubber cloth according to Mr. Chaffee's process, and from it made wagon-covers, piano-covers, caps, coats, and a few other articles, and, in a little while, added to their list of products shoes without fiber. They had no difficulty in disposing of their stock. Every body had taken the "India-rubber fever," as the excitement caused by Mr. ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... chairs has got to be moved—there he is, in the wings—see the piano ain't dragged down too far! Leon, got your mute on your pocket? Please Mr. Ginsberg—you must excuse—Here, Leon, is your glass of water. Drink it, I say. Shut that door out there, boy, so there ain't a draft in the wings. Here, Leon, your violin. Got neckerchief? ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... frightened her with that even-unto-death, rise-from- the-grave stunt of his that she in the end inclined to the dago music- player. But it is all guesswork, and the facts are, sufficient. He wasn't a dago; he was a Russian count—this was straight; and he wasn't a professional piano-player or anything of the sort. He played the violin and the piano, and he sang—sang well—but it was for his own pleasure and for the pleasure of those he sang for. He had money, too—and right here let me say that Flush of Gold never cared a rap for money. She was ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... This man is apparently unaware whether you are listening to him or not. He is not a fool. A fool is occasionally amusing— Longrush never. No subject comes amiss to him. Whatever the topic, he has something uninteresting to say about it. He talks as a piano-organ grinds out music steadily, strenuously, tirelessly. The moment you stand or sit him down he begins, to continue ceaselessly till wheeled away in cab or omnibus to his next halting-place. As in the case of his prototype, his rollers are changed about once a month to suit the ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... little too much for the tired brain in the small room. Either that, or the incessant noises in the street outside, which have now been enriched by the strains of a broken-down street piano, causes him to lay aside his pen and lean back in a weary ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... "Well, I like it immensely. I think it's so awfully uncommon. I suppose you could never get a piano that would go with the ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... highly educated, handsome, attractive, with a mezzo-soprano voice of rare beauty and great skill as a piano-forte accompanyist, she had not only suitors who took her rejection without bitterness, but hosts of friends. She knew all the nice London people of her day: Lady Feenix, who in some ways resembled her, Diana Dombey, who did not quite ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... into the drawing-room. The ladies were grouped together at one end, near the piano. Margot was among them. She was, as usual, dressed in white, and round the bottom of her gown there was an edging of snow-white fur. As we came in, she moved away from the piano to a sofa at some distance, and sank down upon it. Professor Black, ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... the kitchen at the wash tub. Daughter in the parlor at the piano. Quite proper; its a ...
— Wise or Otherwise • Lydia Leavitt
... service. They sang hymns at the piano, selecting oftenest those which made best display of Miss Garnet's and Mr. March's voices. Hers was only mezzo-soprano and not brilliant, but Mr. March and a very short college girl, conversing for a moment aside, agreed that it was ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... were never flustered; their employments were a kind of lark, it seemed, never to be referred to except in the most jocular fashion. When Rose had entrusted to the oven a wedding-cake or a pan of jumbles she would repair to the piano for a ten-minute indulgence in Chopin. Similarly indifferent to fate, Nan at intervals in the day drew a tablet and fountain-pen from her sewing-table and recorded some whimsicality which she had seemingly found embedded in the mesh of ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... home of one Wheeler, a wealthy man with a family. And because he'd "been in the army" he becomes guide, philosopher and friend to the members of that distracted family group. Clarence's position is an anomolous one. He mends the plumbing, tunes the piano, types—off stage—and plays the saxophone. And around him revolves such a group of characters as only Booth Tarkington could offer. It is a real American comedy, at which the audience ripples ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts • Paul Dickey
... prima" (UZIELLl).]; the second is that two third ones above are over the two third ones below [Footnote 10: terze di sotto: "Intende qui senza dubbio parlare di foglie decussate, in cui il terzo verticello e nel piano del primo" (UZIELLI).]; and the third way is that the third above is over the third below [Footnote 11: 3a ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... formidable-looking intervals resolve themselves into something quite natural and generally not difficult of apprehension by a musical ear. Unfortunately we are compelled to learn music through the medium of a keyed instrument, generally through the most unmusical of instruments, the piano, and we learn theory largely through the eye and the reason instead of through the ear. The problems of harmony will seem much simpler if we remember that its basis is the interval—music does not ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... belonged to him. As he looked at them with a sort of vague curiosity they seemed to swell and grow, these two strange, fettered hands, until they measured yards across, while the steel bands shrunk to the thinness of piano wire, cutting deeper and deeper into the flesh. Then the hands in turn began to shrink down and the cuffs to grow up into great, thick things as cumbersome as the couplings of a freight car. A voice that Mr. Trimm dimly recognized as his own was saying something about ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... affairs prospered; he had become bookkeeper in Bernhard's business. His biographer Kayserling tells us that at this period he was in a fair way to develop into "a true bel esprit"; he took lessons on the piano, went to the theatre and to concerts, and wrote poems. During the winter he was at his desk at the office from eight in the morning until nine in the evening. In the summer of 1756, his work was lightened; after two in the afternoon he was his own master. The following year finds him comfortably ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... nearest inn, complaining that he was dying of thirst, for he wished to give Mr. Dallas an excuse for asking him to his house. Mr. Dallas availed himself of the excuse; and Mike prayed that he might find the ladies at home. They were in the drawing-room. The piano was played, and amid tea and muffins, tennis was discussed, allusions ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... and after a minute or two the door was opened by a handsome young man whose ruffled hair and general air of creased disorder led her to conclude that he had just risen from a long-limbed sprawl on a sofa strewn with tumbled cushions. This sofa, and a grand piano bearing a basket of faded roses, a biscuit-tin and a devastated breakfast tray, almost filled the narrow sitting-room, in the remaining corner of which another man, short, swarthy and humble, sat examining the ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... the music of the Indian is equalled by the trouble he has with our instruments. His attention is engaged by the mechanism. He hears the thud of the hammer, "the drum inside" the piano, the twanging of the metal strings, and the abrupt, disconnected tones. Until he is able to ignore these noises he cannot recognise the most familiar tune. Even then, if his songs are played as an unsupported aria, they are unsatisfactory ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... heavy and rather unwieldy, pleasant-faced man. Twenty-five years before, when secretary to the commissary at Noirmont, he had married a girl of entrancing beauty, who used to teach the piano in a boarding-school. One evening, after four years of marriage, four years of torture, during which the unhappy man suffered every sort of humiliation, Jorance came home to find the house empty. His wife had gone without a word ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... it better to say nothing about Higson, except that he was the first lieutenant of his brother's ship. While supper was being prepared, Ivanowna, observing that the English officers were good enough to be pleased with her singing, went to the piano and sang several songs, with which Higson expressed himself highly delighted. Every moment his admiration of the young lady evidently increased. She was not, it must be acknowledged, possessed of what could be called classical beauty; she was fair, certainly, with blue eyes, ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... the quiet summer evenings in the drawing-room, where my cousins played the piano and sang "The Sunset Tree," "Alknoomuk," "I see them on the winding way," and Moore's melodies. Tempi passati—"'Tis sixty year's since." Caroline meantime married a Mr. Wight, who had passed most ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... orphan and almost a beggar. For all active and industrious pursuits, Harry was unfitted alike by nature and training. He could sing romantic ditties, and accompany himself with discretion on the piano; he was a graceful although a timid cavalier; he had a pronounced taste for chess; and nature had sent him into the world with one of the most engaging exteriors that can well be fancied. Blond and pink, with dove's eyes ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the way out through a daintily furnished front room, in which Ashton observed an upright piano and other articles of culture that he would never have expected to come upon in this remote section. In passing, the girl picked up a ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... went into the house. It was deliciously cool in the hall, and for a moment peace descended on him. But the distant sound of a piano in the upper regions ejected it again by reminding him of his mission. He bounded up the stairs and knocked at the door of ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... the corner room, the walls of which were covered with pearl-gray paper with a design of golden flowers, while the furniture consisted of some of those white lacquered Louis XVI. pieces which makers turn out by the gross. The rosewood piano showed like a big black blot amidst all the rest. Then, overlooking the Boulevard de Grenelle, came Reine's bedroom, pale blue, with furniture of polished pine. Her parents' room, a very small apartment, was at the other end of the flat, separated from the parlor by the dining-room. The hangings ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... two separate occasions separated by an interval of some months. Or, noticing a familiar critical tone in a remark made at a dinner-table could lead to an acute change of feeling so that the subject who, before dinner, had felt she would like to play a new composition on the piano so as to obtain the opinion of the guest who had exhibited the critical tone, after dinner felt incapable of doing so. Her feelings had been hurt on many former occasions by critical remarks made by him in that tone. The critical remarks were not called to memory ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... was forgotten that evening, when some of the neighbors dropped in for a call. There was music on the piano and some singing, and almost before Bert and Nan knew it, it was time to go to bed. Freddie and Flossie had already retired, worn out by ...
— The Bobbsey Twins - Or, Merry Days Indoors and Out • Laura Lee Hope
... tools, and flower-pots which formed our chief subject of dispute. But this is a digression.) I took the lowest. Could I part with Sandy Tom for any money, or for anything that money could buy? I thought of a speaking doll, a miniature piano, a tiny carriage drawn by four yellow mastiffs, of a fairy purse that should never be empty, with all that might thereby be given to others or kept for oneself: and then I thought of Sandy Tom—of his large, round, soft head; his fine eyes (they were yellow, not blue, and glared with ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... playing an unpleasant sort of air on the piano—an air which was quite needlessly creepy and haunting and insistent. It all seemed like a grim bit out of a play. The tenderness and pride that shone in Anne's eyes as she boasted of her happiness troubled ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... invited all who wished to the saloon, and with the assistance at the piano of a gentleman who sat at the purser's table opposite me (a young Scotch engineer going out to join his brother fruit-farming at the foot of the Rockies), he started some hundred passengers singing hymns. They were asked ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... Cloud Cote, Eve's friends were patiently awaiting her return. Nolan was reading poetry aloud to himself in the roof garden, and Lieutenant Ames was laboriously picking chords on the piano, with Marie near him ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... room, of which I am fond, because I am used to it and to the old, dingy, broken furniture that's in it. You should marry, and bring your pretty little wife into the house, and she would sing to me and play the piano or the organ, and would keep pretty little chambermaids that I could pat on the cheeks, and your little wife would let me kiss her fair, soft little hands; it would be delicious! Then I should hear a little scolding and quarrelling in the house, and you ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... room looking towards the sea; there was a good strong table with a black oil-cloth cover and four hair-seated chairs, such as were much used at that time. But there were two or three pretty pictures on the walls, and a cottage piano, and in the bookcase were a few bright-coloured tempting volumes as well as the graver-looking school-books. Everything was very neat, and there was a bright fire burning, and in a pot on the window-sill a geranium ...
— The Rectory Children • Mrs Molesworth
... the folding doors sideways and every time he sits down the man in the apartment below us kicks because we move the piano so often. ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart
... with all the means of enjoyment at hand which these had, should have been very merry, but these were not. The absence of their hosts made the great house seem very empty. Nobody had heart for any music, though Dorothy bravely brought out her violin and Helena took her place at the piano, ready to accompany. But, unfortunately, the first melody which came to Dolly's mind was one that Father John, Aunt Betty, and poor Jim had ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... of information. The work was finished; teachers came from foreign lands, masters of languages, teachers of science, and metaphysicians to puzzle the heads of the old and weary the brain of the young. Teachers of music with massive organs for the music rooms of the college arrived, teachers of piano and harp, all of which were a revelation to these simple people, who could not conceive of any sweeter music than the song of the birds, their mothers evening hymn or the soft sweet notes of the happy wife as she crooned ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... occupied herself less with the children, not with the same intensity as formerly, and paid more and more attention to herself, to her face,—although she concealed it,—to her pleasures, and even to her perfection from the worldly point of view. She began to devote herself passionately to the piano, which had formerly stood forgotten in the corner. There, at the piano, ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... Shall these, then, be brought beneath the ban of limitless darkness, and exiled from the "many mansions" of our Heavenly Father's and Mother's house? A tiny rap, untraceable to any material source, a table moved by invisible force, a closed and locked piano skillfully played upon by unseen hands; these were the first links in an endless chain of eternal benefits pouring down from the smiling heavens upon the benighted children of earth. Again was heard "the ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... marble, stood a clock representing Venus crouching, on a fine block of marble; a moquette carpet, of Turkish design, harmonized this room with that of Cesarine, which opened out of it, and was coquettishly hung with Persian chintz. A piano, a pretty wardrobe with a mirror door, a chaste little bed with simple curtains, and all the little trifles that young girls like, completed the arrangements of the room. The dining-room was behind the bedroom of Cesar and his wife, and was entered from the staircase; ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... charitably judged her, Lucia was, in truth, painfully and anxiously occupied by the illness of her mother. Mr. Percy, aware of her engagement for the evening, had ridden over early in the afternoon and spent an hour or two lounging beside her, at the piano or on the verandah. At last, when it grew nearly time for her to start for Mrs. Scott's, ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... row of chairs—has got to be moved. There he is, in the wings. See that the piano ain't dragged down too far! Leon, got your mute in your pocket? Please, Mr. Ginsberg—you must excuse—Here, Leon, is your glass of water; drink it, I say. Shut that door out there, boy, so there ain't a draught ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... he started for Bayou Sara to see his wife. Beaching Mr. Johnson's house in the early morning, he went at once to his wife's apartment: "Her door was ajar, already she was dressed and sitting by her piano, on which a young lady was playing. I pronounced her name gently, she saw me, and the next moment I held her in my arms. Her emotion was so great I feared I had acted rashly, but tears relieved our hearts, ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... married to a lovely young lady who once worked an entire piano cover with worsted. They had commenced housekeeping but a few months, when one morning the husband informed his wife that he should invite a friend to dine with him ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to be—a fairly well-educated, up-to-date young woman with whom a friendly flirtation was just what it was with white womankind—the pleasant amusement of an hour or season. It was a mistake—a very big mistake. Tannis understood something of piano playing, something less of grammar and Latin, and something less still of social prevarications. But she understood absolutely nothing of flirtation. You can never get an Indian to see the ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... instruction from him; my sister and Lily being also his pupils. He at all events, stored their minds with useful knowledge, although unable to instruct them in those feminine accomplishments which young ladies in eastern cities consider of so much importance. A piano they had never seen, but they knew what it was like from pictures. They, however, had guitars, which Uncle Denis purchased from some Mexicans, and they became very fair musicians, being able to accompany their voices on the instruments with taste and skill. My father taught them ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... Tartar invasion of Europe (1240-1242), whom he has split into two kings. Batu bore the surname of Sain Khan, or "the Good Prince," by which name he is mentioned, e.g., in Makrizi (Quatremere's Trans. II. 45), also in Wassaf (Hammer's Trans. pp. 29-30). Piano Carpini's account of him is worth quoting: "Hominibus quidem ejus satis benignus; timetur tamen valde ab iis; sed crudelissimus est in pugna; sagax est multum; et etiam astutissimus in bello, quia longo tempore jam pugnavit." This Good Prince was indeed crudelissimus in ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... from his sister telling of young Arthur's infatuation for the cheap actress, Miss Fotheringay, the story carries one along in the leisurely way of the last century. All the people are a delight, from Captain Costigan to Fowker, and from the French chef, who went to the piano for stimulus in his culinary work, to Blanche Amory and her amazing French affectations. But Pendennis is ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... courtyard of the chateau, then classified, registered, packed and "put into two carts, upon which they took care to place the Red Cross flag." We read in the note-book of a wounded German soldier, under medical treatment at Brussels, "A car has arrived at the hospital, bringing war booty, a piano, two sewing machines and all sorts ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... which no violinist has ever been able to play. Victor Herbert has recently analyzed some of these compositions and shown that Paganini himself could never have played them without using four hands and handling two bows at once. So far, no one can play a duet on the piano; the hand can span only so many keys, and the attempt of Robert Schumann to improve on Nature by building an artificial extension to his fingers was vetoed by paralysis of the members. Two bodies can not occupy the same space at the same time; mathematics has its limit, for you ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... attain the highest development of his musical genius and to become so world-renowned as none has been before him, and in this was successful. He has not only maintained his standing as the greatest master of modern piano virtuosos, but has had the greatest influence on his followers and scholars, Taussig, v. Bulow, Mr. and Mme. Bronsart, Menter, and other younger and older pianists who have had the benefits of his instruction for a greater or ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... And she, if she felt the prick of fancy stimulated to a dangerous point, knew that it was time to leave her boudoir; she came out of the atmosphere surcharged with desires that she drew in with her breath, sat down to the piano, and sang the most exquisite songs of modern music, and so baffled the physical attraction which at times showed her no mercy, though she was strong enough to ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... breast! (At this part of the lecture Artemus pretended to tell a story—the piano playing loudly all the time. He continued his narration in excited dumb-show—his lips moving as though he were speaking. For some minutes the audience ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 6 • Charles Farrar Browne
... chums, the love of your wife, and a new piano's tune— Which of the three will you trust at the end of an ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... of a sudden, just as they were playing the game called "Jump on the piano, and play a queer tune," there came a ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Adventures • Howard R. Garis
... tea-table, always exquisitely dressed; seldom alone, for Mr. Rodney had many friends, and lived in a capacious apartment, rather finely furnished, with a round table covered with gaudy print-books, a mantelpiece crowded with vases of mock Dresden, and a cottage piano, on which Imogene could accompany ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... to throw oil upon the troubled waters,—low, languid, and full of pacifying intonations. She was a tall, thin woman, clad in a blue-checked homespun dress, and seated before a great hand-loom, as a lady sits before a piano or an organ. The creak of the treadle, and the thump, thump of the batten, punctuated, as it were, ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the pouts ever since Saville had blamed the champagne—for she was very anxious to be of bon ton in her own little way—now began to smile once more; and, as the moon played on her arch face, she seated herself at the piano, and, glancing at Godolphin, ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... become as rapid and certain as a reflex. At eight months, or a year before its first attempts at speaking, the infant distinguished between a tone and a noise, as shown by its pleasure on hearing the sounds of a piano; after the first year the child found satisfaction in itself striking the piano. In the twenty-first month it danced to music, and in the twenty fourth imitated song; but it is stated on the authority of other observers that some children have been able to sing pitch ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... I were talking of the unknown people, one rainy night by the fire, while the Mistress was fitfully and interjectionally playing with the piano-keys in an improvising mood. Mandeville has a good deal of sentiment about him, and without any effort talks so beautifully sometimes that I constantly regret I cannot report his language. He has, besides, that sympathy of presence—I believe it is called magnetism by ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... unobtrusive room, abounding in pleasant suggestions if you sat still and let them sink in: books around the walls, a few water colours and bits of porcelain, an open piano, a work table, a broad divan with many cushions, ferns in the ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... brought home to her, although she made fun of it and pretended she didn't care. Music had been her young heart's dream. It was the only art for which she showed a genuine regard. And two of her pet grievances were that she didn't have a piano, and that, if she had one, she could not ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... gold-fish in the pond at the bottom of his garden, he had rabbits in the pantry, white mice in his piano, a squirrel in the linen closet and a ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... was automatically sawing across the string. The note resulting was evidently higher than the range of the human ear, because no audible sound resulted. It was later estimated that the destructive note was several octaves higher than the highest note on a piano. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... the fairy tales, all things become possible. You know that a lady in a mob-cap and panniers is playing inside that shyly curtained window. Hark! You can hear the thin, delicate notes quite plainly: this is such a quiet little street. A piano rather out of tune? Perish the thought! Dear friend, it is a spinet,—a harpsichord. Almost ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... taken a turn or two in the moonlight to get rid of the excitement of the evening, bent our steps in that direction. There were about as many persons assembled as the little drawing-room would hold, and Clara, having forgotten her headach, and looking as lovely as ever, was seated at a wretched piano, endeavouring to accompany herself in her favourite songs. Willingham and myself stood by, and our repeated requests for some of those melodies which, unknown to us before, we had learnt from her singing to admire beyond all the fashionable trash of the day, were gratified with untiring ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... Austrian capital a large number of pupils, some of whom afterwards became eminent musicians. Among these were Beethoven, Hummel, Moscheles and Josef Weigl (1766-1846). Albrechtsberger died in Vienna on the 7th of March 1809. His published compositions consist of preludes, fugues and sonatas for the piano and organ, string quartets, &c.; but the greater proportion of his works, vocal and instrumental, exists only in manuscript. They are in the library of the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Probably the most valuable service he rendered ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... cave. You'll find lots of gold there. And the first lot that comes to me is goin' to be spent for a self-playin' piano. But what happened here?" Billee asked, for he was now aware that ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... the little southern parlor of the house you may have seen With the gambrel-roof, and the gable looking westward to the green, At the side toward the sunset, with the window on its right, Stood the London-made piano I am ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... spread out her fingers till they looked as though they would pretty much cover the keyboard, from the growling end to the little squeaky one. Then those two hands of hers made a jump at the keys as if they were a couple of tigers coming down on a flock of black-and-white sheep, and the piano gave a great howl as if its tail had been trod on. Dead stop—so still you could hear your hair growing. Then another jump, and another howl, as if the piano had two tails and you had trod on both of 'em at once, and then a grand clatter and scramble ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... at best. I wish they could be abolished. They are always slamming, punching holes in the plastering with their knobs, creaking on their hinges, bruising the piano, pinching babies' fingers, and making old folks see stars when they get up in the night to look for burglars. Heavy curtains are infinitely more graceful, equally warm, and not half so stubbornly unmanageable. Then think of entering ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... laughingly. "There's a sum in it not to be picked up on every gooseberry bush. Gilman Harris paid me this morning for that bit of woodland I sold him last fall—five hundred dollars. I promised that you and the girls should have it to get a new piano, so ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... some handsome young fellow who has stood behind her chair for six months, turned over her music, or accompanied her through a few liquorish airs, vows his tender passion, brings her the last new song, and at length swears to be her accompaniment throughout life. The piano is then locked up, the music sent to Bath or Canterbury, and the lady ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... to serenade their friends in the cool and brilliant moonlit evenings of the dry season, playing French and Italian marches and dance music with very good effect. The guitar was the favourite instrument with both sexes, as at Para; the piano, however, is now fast superseding it. The ballads sung to the accompaniment of the guitar were not learned from written or printed music, but communicated orally from one friend to another. They were never spoken of as ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... on the following morning we reached Moldeoen, where the steamer landed us on a rock on which were a few acres of grass and half a dozen wooden houses. We had a good deal of luggage with us, also some casks, cases, and barrels of provisions, and a piano-forte, as our place of sojourn is somewhat out of the way and far removed from civilised markets. A few poverty-stricken natives stood on the rude stone pier as we landed, and slowly assisted us to unload. At the time I conceived that the idiotical expression of their countenances ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... be? With a start, I stopped short, in the middle of that court, heedless of the crowd of pushing, shouting children who at once gathered about me. I had been struck by an old recollection. My sister used to sing. I remembered where her piano had stood in the great drawing-room. It had been carted away during those dreadful weeks and her music all burned; but the vision of her graceful figure bending over the keyboard was one not to be forgotten even by a thoughtless child. Could it be—oh, ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... that cultivated intellect alone opens to the mind the existence of evils which are intensified by the difficulty of their removal, and on which the mind dwells with feelings kindred to despair. I have sometimes doubted whether an obscure farmer's daughter is any happier with her piano, and her piles of cheaply illustrated literature and translations of French novels, and her smatterings of science learned in normal schools, since she has learned too often to despise her father and mother and brother, and her uneducated rural beau, and all her surroundings, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... impression at all to her mind. Observe your favourite pussy curled up in the arm-chair at such time as she knows the dishes have been cleared away, and there is no more chance of wheedling a titbit from you. You may play the piano, or the violin, or knock with a hammer, or shout your loudest, she will take no notice, no more than if she actually had no ears at all. Are you, therefore, to conclude she does not hear you? As well conclude that people do not hear the thunder ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... such intent; and amply did their performance repay my curiosity, for visiting Venetian beauties, so justly celebrated for their seducing manners and soft address. They accompanied their voices with the forte-piano, and sung a thousand buffo songs, with all that gay voluptuousness for which ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... would find Macklin, the sculptor—up from his atelier in the basement—buried in a chair and a book, pipe in mouth, before Gregg's fire—had been there for hours when Phil entered. Again he would catch the sound of the piano as he mounted the stairs, only to discover Putney, the landscape painter, running his fingers over the keys, while Adam stood before his easel touching his canvas here or there; or he would interrupt old Sonheim, ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... prolonged into a sigh. These were marks on which I made no comments at the time. My own situation was calculated to breed confusion in my thoughts and awkwardness in my gestures. Breakfast being finished, the lady, apparently at the request of Welbeck, sat down to a piano-forte. ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... munificence,—and reached the symmetrical garden-beds and graveled walk. She ran up the steps of the veranda and entered the drawing-room through the open French window. Glancing around the familiar room, at her father's closed desk, at the open piano with the piece of music she had been practicing that morning, the whole walk seemed only a foolish dream that had frightened her. She was Cissy Trixit, the daughter of the richest man in the town! This was her father's house, ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... all," she said, laying the paper aside and returning to her former place near the piano. Her face was drawn and white, and there was a hard, metallic ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... managed to raise a laugh a little while before—she being the person laughed at. She chanced to hear Luke, who was running lightly over the old and yellowed keys of the piano, say: ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... playing, the piano seems alive, With all the notes as busy as the bees are in a hive; And when it's time for Bedfordshire, as sweetly as a lark She sings that God is waiting to protect us in ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... could love, and Teresa scarcely knew what repose was. Whether playing with her children (and she had two lovely ones—the eldest six years old), or teasing her calm and meditative husband, or pouring out extempore verses, or rattling over airs which she never finished, on the guitar or piano—or making excursions on the lake—or, in short, in whatever occupation she appeared as the Cynthia of the minute, she was always gay and mobile—never out of humour, never acknowledging a single care or cross in life—never ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Sipiagin said to Nejdanov, "we are addicted to the bad habit of playing cards in the evening, and even play a forbidden game, stukushka.... I won't ask you to join us, but perhaps Mariana will be good enough to play you something on the piano. You like music, I hope." And without waiting for an answer Sipiagin took up a pack of cards. Mariana sat down at the piano and played, rather indifferently, several of Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words." Charmant! Charmant! quel touche! Kollomietzev ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... spoke he threw open the door of a large drawing-room and invited us in. On entering we found a company of men and women, well-dressed, some in ordinary evening attire and some costumed. The room was brilliantly lighted and beautifully furnished and decorated. At one end was a grand piano, round which several persons were grouped; others were seated on ottomans taking tea or coffee; and others strolled about, talking. Our host, who appeared to be master of the ceremonies, introduced us to several ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... sides of the wide-open door, Texas and Pat standing to welcome them. From one room to another Barbara ran in laughing delight, followed by the three, who were perspiring in an agony of suspense while Jefferson Worth looked on. The cook stove was not in the parlor, nor was the piano—out of place. In the proper room Barbara even found her trunks. There was a supply of provisions in the pantry and kindlings even ready by the kitchen stove for the morning fire. If there were little irregularities here and there, Barbara, ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... heard a brilliant preluding passage on the piano, then Adelade's glorious voice pronounced that stirring recitative, 'O Patria.' This was the passage alluded to by the young dandies in the caff. I laid down my book, and leaned forward to listen. The recitative over, then followed that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... trying moment for Milly and me. A little pallor showed under the Rube's tan, but he was more composed than I had expected. Nan got up from the piano. She was all in white and deliciously pretty. She gave a quick, glad start of surprise. What a relief that was to my troubled mind! Everything had depended upon a real honest liking for ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... nights out; piano, well furnished sitting room; month's holiday with wages each year; three days off per week; washing sent out; wage, one guinea ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... the worse for Colorow society," laughed Serviss. Then, to clear the shadow which had gathered on the girl's face, he said: "I see a fine piano, and shelves of music books. This argues that you love music. Won't you sing for me? I am hungry ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... great old house, now converted into spacious flats, was a small, rather tarnished brass plate with the words: "Dr. Moroni, Primo Piano." ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... the East River; and Miss McCray conducted me into the cabin to a large party of boys, elderly women, and children, most of them visitors like myself, and all listening to a powerful-wristed youth happily playing, "You'll Come Back and Hang Around," with heavily accented rag-time, on an upright piano. ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... of dancing. "If it is a fault to love it," said Charlotte, "I am ready to confess that I prize it above all other amusements. If anything disturbs me, I go to the piano, play an air to which I have danced, and all goes ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... the cosey corner, the prints upon the walls, and the books on the little table, spoke of a pathetic attempt to reproduce the surroundings of luxurious art without the large outlay that art demands. At one side of the room stood a piano with music lying carelessly about. In another corner was Iola's guitar, which she seldom used now except when intimate friends gathered for one of the little suppers she loved to give. Then she took it up to sing the mammy ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... will manage it somehow, for I must go and see that dear Katie. I do feel so ashamed of myself when I think of all the good she is doing, and I do nothing but put flowers about, and play the piano. ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... table neither too low to be pretty nor too high to be useful; a couple of armchairs, hospitably embracing; a pair of silver candlesticks, quaint and homely; a goodly company of pleasant books; a piano, just escaping from its travelling-cage, with all its pent-up music in its bosom; a cosey little cot clinging to its ampler mother; a stream of generous sunlight from the window gilding and gladdening all,—behold our home ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... feet had at last reached the last flight of steps under the flat roof of the house, the "Skylarkers" were singing "Old Dog Tray" at the top of their voices, to the accompaniment of a piano, and of some other instruments, the character of which our young hero failed to recognize, although the strains had grown louder and louder as the ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... educated with a care which her sisters had not enjoyed; painted pretty well, spoke Italian and English, and played the piano brilliantly; her voice, trained by the best masters, had a ring in it which made her singing irresistibly charming. Clever, and intimate with every branch of literature, she might have made folks believe that, as Mascarille says, people of quality come into ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... preparation of her own to increase its laying capacity. This necessitated it being kept in the drawing-room, as otherwise she forgot all about it; and Vane had a vivid recollection of a large and incredibly stout bird with a watery and furtive eye ensconced on cushions near the piano. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... his eyes for him! I'm going to ruin. I'm neglecting myself. He doesn't know me at all. What am I to him? He calls me darling and little devil. He would say the same to any piano-teacher. He makes no pretensions. Everything is alright, to him. That comes from his never in his life having felt the need of ...
— Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit) - A Tragedy in Four Acts • Frank Wedekind
... seating capacity of two thousand. The Sunday School room and lecture room of the Lower Temple is forty-eight by one hundred and six feet in dimensions. It also has many beautiful stained-glass windows. On the platform is a cabinet organ and a grand piano. In the rear of the lecture room is a dining-room, forty-five by forty-six feet, with a capacity for seating five hundred people. Folding tables and hundreds of chairs are stowed away in the store rooms when not in use in the great dining-room. Opening out of this room are ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... Let their awful presences shame and transfigure, terrify and transport us, into reality of communication akin to their own! "I will express myself in music to you," said a great composer to a bereft woman, as he took his seat at the piano. He felt that he could not manifest otherwise the feeling in him that was so deep. By sound or by silence, let it be only the conviction of our heart we venture to offer to spirits before whom the meaning of all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... but he has succeeded in devising instruments which register that impact, and which make it perceptible to the organs of sight or of hearing. The operation of the electrical waves may be best explained, perhaps, by the analogy of sound. When the string of a piano is struck by its hammer it vibrates, and communicates its vibrations to the surrounding air; these vibrations, travelling outwards in waves, produce corresponding vibrations in the ear-drum of a listener. The string is tuned, by its ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... a wretched people they are! Not one of them knows Russian! Muzeek, muzeek, savey muzeek voo? savey? Well, speak, do! Compreny? savey muzeek voo? on the piano, savey zhooey?' ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... way of looking at those who groaned unnecessarily and out of idle self-pity, which was conducive to silence, and therefore to the comfort of others. She smoothed no pillows and proffered no soft words of sympathy. But it was she who found out that the cure had a piano. She it was who took two hospital attendants to the priest's humble house and brought the instrument away. She had it placed inside the altar rails, and fought the cure afterwards in the vestry as to the heinousness ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... should like to be a piano teacher, when I grow up, for then I shall be able to learn to play many ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... the family. His father died and his mother married an actor, Ludwig Geyer. The stepfather became very fond of young Richard and intended to make a painter of him, but upon hearing him play some of his sister's piano pieces Geyer wondered if it were possible that he had ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... Gluck, a piano manufacturer of Munich, was a follower of Horace Fletcher, the American munching missionary. Unlike the Swiss, who craved raw food, Herr Gluck ate everything, but each mouthful only after thorough maceration, salivation, and slow deglutition. At breakfast he absorbed a glass of milk and a piece ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... moped along he beheld two unkempt Italians having a piano-organ and a violin. The music was not fine, but it touched a chord in Ayrault's breast, for he had waltzed with Sylvia to that air, and it made ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... to us, my dear Maestro, that I doubt if you could find a family where your name is spoken more often, or with greater enthusiasm. My niece sings and plays, she spends almost the whole day at her piano, knows your works by heart, and has had the greatest desire to meet you, particularly since the last of your concerts. She had been promised an invitation from Princess Gallizin, in Vienna, in a few ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... Hoboken safely. The sea was comparatively calm, but all of a sudden a waterspout arose close to the ship, and a great mass of water burst over the ladies' saloon, crushing through its roof and the roof of the deck below and hurling a piano down into ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... go. You've got your lessons to get. Well, now, mother, make up your mind if you're comin' along. Cora, what on earth are you doing out here in the night air with nothing around you? Now, you mosey right back into that parlor, and don't you make a move off that piano-stool till your hour's up. Do you hear me? No. Frank. I told you once you couldn't go and that ends it. Stop your whining! I can't have you running hither and yon all hours of the night, and we not know where you are. Well, hurry up, then, mother. ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... women clothed in red baize, while his wife was seated in front of him. Between the speeches the ladies burst forth into a sort of plaintive ditty. The party was entertained by a band of musicians, consisting of three drummers and four performers on the marimba, a species of piano. It consists of two bars of wood placed side by side; across these are fixed fifteen wooden keys, each two or three inches broad and about eighteen long, their thickness being regulated by the deepness of the note required. Each of the keys has a calabash below it, the upper portion of which, ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... it became the "tabernacle." Week-days it was known as the "schoolhouse," and at odd times it was spoken of as the "theatre," the "concert-hall," and the "Trigger Island court-house." In one corner stood the grand piano from the Doraine, regularly and laboriously tuned by the great Joseppi. Madame Careni-Amori gave vocal and instrumental lessons here every afternoon in the week, from three to six. Among the older children there were a number who had voices that seemed worth developing, and the famous ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... of the weather confined the girls to the house the following day. Harvey was absent at breakfast, and at dinner the chair opposite Irene's was still vacant. The afternoon wore away, and at dusk Louisa opened the piano and began to play Thalberg's ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... favourable. It was understood that he painted pictures and played very finely on the piano, and every one could see that he dressed in the most fashionable manner and that he was handsome and light-hearted. But it could not be hid that he often came for money, which old Mr. Tresham had sometimes to borrow in St. Penfer for him. And business men noted ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... offices. Once I happened to say that I did not like the food as it was cooked at the boarding-house; and the next day, and for many days after, all sorts of dainties were sent to me, prepared by hands which were as skilful on the piano, or with a pencil, as they were in handling a saucepan. New books were lent to me, and I was never allowed to be without a beautiful bouquet. One young lady used constantly to walk in to town, some two or three ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... us. The young ladies invariably complain that they have neither music, nor drawing, nor dancing masters. There is evidently a great deal of musical taste among them, and, as in every part of Mexico, town or country, there is a piano (tal cual) in every house; but most of those who play are self-taught, and naturally abandon it very soon, for want of instruction or encouragement. We are now going to dine out, and in the evening we go to a concert in the theatre, given by the Senora Cesari ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... some of the business buildings were only canvas; and these, and the multitude of tents, gleamed dully like a great encampment. Voices sounded constantly, echoing across the water; hammering never ceased; music floated—strains of violin and trumpet and piano! From the water-front clear back up the sides of the hills San Francisco was alive by night as by day. And on the hour all the vessels in the harbor struck their bells, ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... men trooping down the stairs, laughing and calling to one another as they went, and judging from this that they had departed for the night, he put out all the lights in the library and closed the piano, and lifted the windows to clear the room of the tobacco-smoke. He did not notice the beautiful photograph sitting upright in the armchair before the fireplace, and so left it alone in ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... a gifted musician became generally known when classical strains from a grand piano were wafted through the Duranta hedge which encompassed his grounds, riveting passers-by to the roadway at some sacrifice to personal dignity, that they might listen and admire. Sometimes he was heard to sing to his own accompaniment in a voice of extraordinary ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... impact of electrical waves, but he has succeeded in devising instruments which register that impact, and which make it perceptible to the organs of sight or of hearing. The operation of the electrical waves may be best explained, perhaps, by the analogy of sound. When the string of a piano is struck by its hammer it vibrates, and communicates its vibrations to the surrounding air; these vibrations, travelling outwards in waves, produce corresponding vibrations in the ear-drum of a listener. The string is tuned, by its tension and its weight, to a single ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... orchestral leader and composer of operas. His father was a professional singer, who took his son's musical education in hand at the age of four. At eight the boy was a fluent performer both on the violin and on the piano. When but ten years old Beethoven produced his first pianoforte sonata, and was installed as assistant organist in the Electoral Chapel at Bonn. When the lad visited Vienna, in 1787, his extemporizations on the piano made Mozart exclaim: ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... the tea thoughtfully. So far Mr. Travers had hardly spoken, but he cheered in true British fashion at the sight of the tea. Sara Lee, exceedingly curious as to the purpose of a very small stand somewhat resembling a piano stool, which the maid had placed at her knee, learned that it was ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... gentle womanhood," wrote George Eliot, "which supersedes all acquisitions, all accomplishments. You would never have asked at any period of Mrs. Amos Barton's life if she sketched or played the piano. You would perhaps have been rather scandalized if she had descended from the serene dignity of being to the assiduous unrest of doing." However, when he recalls the female singers he has known, any man will grant that they have been almost without exception ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... re-twisted before our friend found that he had twisted them enough; how many discordant scrapes gave promise of the coming harmony. How much the muslin fluttered and crumpled before Eleanor and another nymph were duly seated at the piano; how closely did that tall Apollo pack himself against the wall, with his flute, long as himself, extending high over the heads of his pretty neighbours; into how small a corner crept that round and florid little minor ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... I asked for a "match-girls' drawing-room." "It will want a piano, tables for papers, for games, for light literature; so that it may offer a bright, homelike refuge to these girls, who now have no real homes, no playground save the streets. It is not proposed to build an 'institution' ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... arose in the coal; Elsie luxuriated in the rocking-chair all to herself; while Francie and Sylvia—a tight fit—shared the big basket-chair. In a corner three chums were coaching each other in the speeches for a play, and a group collected round the piano were trying the chorus ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... agents rich all over the country. But women don't like clothes wringers; why? Because they require such hard work. All right—hitch on my Household Horse, and the power required is reduced three-fifths and a day's wash may be put on the line as easy as a girl could play The Maiden's Prayer on a piano—eh? Or, say, put it on a churn—same Horse—one's all that's needed to a house. Or make it an ice cream freezer or a cradle or a sewing machine, or anything on earth that runs by a crank—and 'y gory, man, you make housework a joy. I sold Laura one—traded her one for lessons ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... say who is more nervous that night, Hotlips or a certain piano player with my name. Frankie is smirking like always, and Stella Starlight is sitting and looking beautiful while she waits for her cue. Hotlips is fumbling with his trumpet like maybe he never sees one before. And I—even I am not exactly calm ...
— The Flying Cuspidors • V. R. Francis
... to have a house of my own, when I'm grown up," said pretty Del; "I shall have a red carpet and some curtains; my husband will buy me a piano." ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... course of the following years Garlan used often to come to Vienna on business, and never omitted to visit Bertha's family on such occasions. After supper it was Bertha's custom to play the piano for Garlan's entertainment, and he used to listen to her with an almost reverent attention, and would, perhaps, go on to talk of his little nephew and niece—who were both very musical—and to whom he would often speak of Fraulein Bertha as the finest pianiste ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... giving. Many people choose a present just because they happen to like the thing themselves, whereas a gift should be selected entirely with a view to the pleasure or use it will afford to its future owner. A grand piano is no good to a girl who will not have {79} a room large enough to hold it and herself. Costly china is only an encumbrance to a woman who is going to follow the fortunes of her soldier husband, and who will not have a settled home for ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... cannot feel sure that I observed him correctly. It matters little. With or without hesitation, he followed her to the piano. ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... whether or not she would sell or rent her hayfields kept her from coming to a conclusion. Music, in common with all other accomplishments, was viewed by Miss Miranda as a trivial, useless, and foolish amusement, but she allowed Rebecca an hour a day for practice on the old piano, and a little extra time for lessons, if Jane could secure them without payment of ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... not that she has been a hypocrite,—it is that she is a transmigration. You marry a girl for her accomplishments. She paints charmingly, or plays like Saint Cecilia. Clap a ring on her finger, and she never draws again,—except perhaps your caricature on the back of a letter,—and never opens a piano after the honeymoon. You marry her for her sweet temper; and next year, her nerves are so shattered that you can't contradict her but you are whirled into a storm of hysterics. You marry her because she declares she hates balls and likes quiet; and ten ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hundreds of pounds, for the sum is unbelievable. These were young women, and they strode smartly along under these astonishing burdens with the air of people out for a holiday. I was told that a woman will carry a piano on her back all the way up the mountain; and that more than once a woman had done it. If these were old women I should regard the Ghurkas as no more civilized than the Europeans. At the railway station at Darjeeling you find plenty of cab-substitutes —open ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in London, Margaret was alone at her piano and Lushington was announced. Unlike the majority of musicians in real fiction she had not been allowing her fingers to 'wander over the keys,' a relaxation that not seldom leads to outer darkness, where the consecutive fifth plays hide-and-seek with ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... its piano, books and pictures and other scattered evidence of culture and refinement, showed the manner in which the Blaines liked to live. Through the open window, affording a fine view of Central Park, with its rolling lawns, winding paths ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... place at the piano after a while. It seemed that he had promised to sing for her—for her alone. He glanced apprehensively toward the windows, as if to estimate the distance which separated him from the highway. It was no part of their ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... of wheels and pinions, snails and racks, crystals, and faces and watches, cackling at each other. There were striking clocks which rung chimes or rocked like little vessels on apparent billows, or started off with notes like grasshoppers. A hundred of the most musical tree-frogs shut up in a piano might give a feeble notion of the tunes and thrummings assembled in this shop. It was the same day or night, and the power of Fithian Minuit over time-keepers was nearly miraculous. He appeared to be able to smile an old watch into action. Transferred ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... side of the room stood an American piano, and beside it a harp of surpassing richness. Here Carlton and Florinda were seated at this time in all the confidence and enjoyment ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... with stars. But the rain gave no promise of abating and late that afternoon he altered the detail of his rebellion. Fortunately there were other ways. When the dusk closed in and the old man watched the clock and waited, he would go boldly downstairs to the old piano and register his rebellion in music that Adam Craig could hear. He would spend his evening openly with Joan; he would go through fire and water; he would ride the whirlwind and direct the storm but what this time he would assure ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... heart the assurance that she should pass unscathed through the fiery furnace?) she arose with a calmer spirit, and began to survey the apartment in which she was confined. It was a large room, very elegantly furnished, containing a piano, and a profusion of paintings. On examining one of these, Fanny turned away with a burning cheek—for it was one of those immodest productions of the French school, which show how art and talent can be perverted to the basest uses. She looked at no more of the pictures, ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... freedom, conducive to dangerous theorizing and broody reflections on the inequality of the classes. The sun shines in a strip in the centre, yellow and elusive, like gold; someone is rattling a gay galop on a piano somewhere; there is a sound of mens' voices in a heated discussion, a long whiff of pipe-smoke trails through the sunlight from the bar-room; the clink of glasses, the chink of silver, and the high treble ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... wanted a third or fourth synonym. Again, though I have tried and failed to draw recognizable portraits of persons I have seen every day for years, Mr Bernard Partridge, having seen a man once, will, without more strain than is involved in eating a sandwich, draw him to the life. The keyboard of a piano is a device I have never been able to master; yet Mr Cyril Scott uses it exactly as I use my own fingers; and to Sir Edward Elgar an orchestral score is as instantaneously intelligible at sight as a page of Shakespear is to me. One man cannot, after trying for years, finger the flute fluently. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... that, too. But Clementina would not do that; she had tried often enough at home, when her brother Jim was drawing, and her father was designing the patterns of his woodwork; she knew that she never could do it, and the time would be wasted. She decided against piano lessons and singing lessons, too; she did not care for either, and she pleaded that it would be a waste to study them; but she suggested dancing lessons, and her gift for dancing won greater praise, and perhaps sincerer, than her accent won from Mademoiselle Blanc, though Mrs. Lander said that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... life that few letters passed between them. 'He was a true musician; not that he was a great performer on any instrument, but that he so truly appreciated all that was good and beautiful in music. He was a good performer on the piano, and could get such full harmonies out of the organ that stood in one corner of his entrance room at Little Grange as did good to the listener. Sometimes it would be a bit from one of Mozart's Masses, or from one of the finales of some one of his or Beethoven's Operas. And then at times ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... violin, which no violinist has ever been able to play. Victor Herbert has recently analyzed some of these compositions and shown that Paganini himself could never have played them without using four hands and handling two bows at once. So far, no one can play a duet on the piano; the hand can span only so many keys, and the attempt of Robert Schumann to improve on Nature by building an artificial extension to his fingers was vetoed by paralysis of the members. Two bodies can not occupy the same space at the same time; mathematics has its ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... places, with two separate sets of incidents going on; so now I seemed to be divided between two irreconcilable trains of thought; the gorgeous house, its elaborate furnishing, the little glimpses of yesterday's life, as seen in the open piano, with its sheet of music held in place by a lady's fan, occupying my attention fully as much as the aspect of the throng of incongruous and ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... she had just encountered the redskin! Miss Trim was a poor relation of Mrs Ravenshaw. She had been invited by her brother-in-law to leave England and come to Red River to act as governess to Tony and assistant-companion in the family. She had arrived that autumn in company with a piano, on which she was expected to exercise Elsie and Cora. Petawanaquat, being the first "really wild and painted savage" she had seen, made a deep impression ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... Norway would adopt it enthusiastically; but that he was still puzzled over the very necessary word to fit the strongly marked refrain. However, he was not going to give it up. Next morning, when Grieg was in his room peacefully giving a piano lesson to a young lady, a furious ringing was heard at his front-door bell, as if the ringer would tear the bell from its wires, followed by a wild shout of "'Fremad! Fremad!' Hurrah, I have got it! 'Fremad!'" Bjornson, for of course the intruder was he, rushed into the house ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... November, 1880, General and Mrs. Toombs celebrated their golden wedding, surrounded by their grandchildren and friends. It was a beautiful sight to see the bride of half a century with a new wedding ring upon her finger, playing the piano, while the old man of seventy essayed, like Washington, to dance the minuet. The old couple survived their three children, and lived to bless the lives of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They were fond and ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... the officers) I admired the ingeniousness with which our nurses have arranged for their wounded a quite charming assembly-room with a piano, some ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the room, scattered in places where even a prowling cat would have been surprised to find them. A straggling cluster of deep red roses in a marmalade jar bowed their heads over tobacco ashes and unwashed goblets. A chafing-dish stood on the piano; a leaf of sheet music supported a stack of sandwiches in a chair. Mary came in, dressed and radiant. Her gown was of that thin, black fabric whose name through the change of a single vowel seems to summon visions ranging between the extremes of man's experience. Spelled ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... of mechanism:—"Florence manufactures excellent silks, woollen cloths, elegant carriages, bronze articles, earthenware, straw hats, perfumes, essences, and candied fruits; also, all kinds of turnery and inlaid work, piano-fortes, philosophical and mathematical instruments, &c. The dyes used at this city are much admired, particularly the black, and its sausages are ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... sure that she was comfortable about her presence there at all, she was pleased with the effect she produced. When the Contessa sang there suddenly appeared out of the midst of the crowd a slim, straight figure in a black gown, which instantly sat down at the piano, played the accompaniments, and disappeared again without a word. The spectators thronging round the piano saw that this was a girl, as graceful and distinguished as the Contessa herself, who passed ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... may sympathize a little in my distresses, let me present him with the tableau before me. Seated upon the piano-stool was a young-lady of at most eighteen years: her face, had it not been for its expression of exuberant drollery and malicious fun, would have been downright beautiful; her eyes, of the deepest blue, and shaded by long lashes, instead of indulging the character of pensive and ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... crumpled handkerchief on the piano keys. Again he was crushing it in the palm of his hand, and again the flood of humiliation and shame swept over him. He dropped the handkerchief, and the great law of his own life seemed to rise up in his face and taunt him. He was clean. That had been his greatest ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... him, he had closed the door and was jingling his spurs along the passage to a spiral stairway of broad concrete steps. As he left the head of the stairway, a dance-time piano measure and burst of laughter made him peep into a white morning room, flooded with sunshine. A young girl, in rose-colored kimono and boudoir cap, was at the instrument, while two others, similarly accoutered, in each ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... America. Doubtless there were other reasons than the lost popularity of needlework as an art, that in England it should have resulted in the life or death practice of necessary needlework, and in America, that the facile fingers of woman simply turned to the ivory keys of the piano for occupation. But the fact remains that starvation threatened the woman of one country, while in the other they were practicing scales. In England it was a period of stress and strain, of veritable ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... macaroni; at Nice, the principles of making candied fruit. I never went to the opera without first buying the book of the piece, and making myself acquainted with the principal airs by picking them out on the piano with one finger." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... goes on four legs. I can dance, and skate, and arrange flowers with taste. I can re-trim a hat, and at a pinch make a whole blouse. I can order a nice meal, and grumble when it is spoiled. I can strum on the piano and paint Christmas cards. I can ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of the Hinkle House was as neat a little parlor as there was in the black-waxy country. It was all willow rocking-chairs, and home-knit tidies, and albums, and conch shells in a row. And a little upright piano in one corner. ...
— Options • O. Henry
... over. Games and dances followed the feast. The piano-top was lifted, and light fingers rattled out lively music to which a hundred flying feet quickly responded. Country-dances they were, the lancers and quadrilles. Round dances were still looked upon in that rural locality as ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... cottage piano was a blue Canton ginger-jar filled with branches of feathery bamboo that spread its lace-like foliage far and wide over the ceiling and walls, quite covering the large spot where the roof had leaked. Various stalks of tropical-looking palms, distributed artistically about, ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... war, "that among the trades which have suffered most are fruiterers, breweries, public-houses, bars, cafes, chemists and perfumers, goldsmiths and silversmiths, jewellers, milliners, furniture and piano dealers, and music and booksellers. Landowners, land speculators, builders and the carrying trade have also suffered." We may also notice that in the early months of the war Florence, the great market of the shoddy "souvenir" and ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... and metre. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains which he himself could ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... she was at the time receiving her young-lady education at the Convent of St. Ursula, where, in the vine-covered, red-brick convent on the summit of Charlestown, she learned, under the guidance of the nuns, to sing, play the piano, the harp, and the guitar, to speak French, and read Spanish and Italian. But her life on Mt. Benedict was suddenly terminated when the convent was burned. So she entered earlier than would otherwise have been the case upon the varied interests of her new and beautiful home. Here, in ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... note resulting was evidently higher than the range of the human ear, because no audible sound resulted. It was later estimated that the destructive note was several octaves higher than the highest note on a piano. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... colonel's defection, and Mr. Touchett, with somewhat of Mrs. Curtis's feeling that it was a backsliding in Lady Temple, suddenly grew absent in a conversation that he was holding with young Mr. Keith upon—of all subjects in the world—lending library books, and finally repaired to the piano, where Grace was playing her mother's favourite music, in hopes of distracting her mind from Fanny's enormity; and there he stood, mechanically thanking Miss Curtis, but all the time turning a melancholy eye upon the game. Alick Keith, meanwhile, ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sub-normal grades entertained their friends. Promptly at 12 m., they filed into the chapel to a march from the piano. Music, recitations, gesture and sewing songs pleasantly filled an hour and a half. A composition, "The New Colony," weaving in, in a humming fashion, the surnames of some of the teachers and pupils, was highly appreciated by the crowded ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 08, August, 1885 • Various
... down at the grand piano and played Chopin's Nocturne in G major, flinging out that elaborate filigree of sound with an impetuosity and superb ABANDON which caused the ladies to exchange astonished glances behind his back. The transitions from the light and ethereal texture ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Dave's sister had always considered the senator's son a very promising young man. Consequently, it can well be imagined that the four young people spent a most enjoyable time that evening in the mansion. The girls played on the piano and all sang, and then some rugs were pushed aside, a phonograph was brought into action, and they danced a number of the latest steps, with the older ...
— Dave Porter and His Double - The Disapperarance of the Basswood Fortune • Edward Stratemeyer
... had Alfred reached the sill of the door than his hand went involuntarily to his head; he turned to the table where he had left his hat. His face wore a puzzled look. He glanced beneath the table, in the chair, behind the table, across the piano, and then he began circling the room with pent up rage. He dashed into his study and out again, he threw the chairs about with increasing irritation, then giving up the search, he started hatless toward the hallway. It was then that a soft babyish ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo
... musician of no mean quality, and there was always a piano in his studio, to which he often turned for rest. When Felix Mendelssohn was in Rome he made the sculptor's workshop his headquarters, and sometimes the two would play "four hands," or else Thorwaldsen would accompany the "Song ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... connection with surgical operations—comprised the entire furniture of the room. The bees were humming among a few flowers placed in pots outside the window; the birds were singing in the garden, and the faint intermittent jingle of a tuneless piano in some neighbouring house forced itself now and again on the ear. In any other place, these everyday sounds might have spoken pleasantly of the everyday world outside. Here, they came in as intruders on ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... she sat in the drawing-room playing the piano to her employer, in had walked the latter's son, a tall, nervous young man, perpetually clearing his throat and fiddling with a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, with the announcement that he had brought his friend, Mr. Rayner, to spend a few days in ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... selling water and syrups, cakes and confectionery, melon seeds and peanuts—others going about with halfpenny buttonholes of gelsomina, each neatly folded up in a vine-leaf to keep the scent in—three independent piano-organs and a brass band in the middle distance—an enthusiastic blind singer, a survival of Demodocus in the Odyssey, with a falsetto voice and no bridge to his nose keeping a group of listeners spellbound ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... a little, there arrived in town a vaulted box, in which the dullest fancy might conjecture a piano. Greatly indeed were heads shaken. If doom were easily invoked, Jane would hardly have lived to unpack the treasure and help to lift ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... no answer save to attempt to lift the cover from the piano, so that Lance was compelled ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... feverish interruptions which often characterized more dignified assemblies were absent here. There was no room for the lesser vices; there was little or no drunkenness; the gaudily dressed and painted women who presided over the wheels of fortune or performed on the harp and piano attracted no attention from those ascetic players. The man who had won ten thousand dollars and the man who had lost everything rose from the table with equal silence and imperturbability. I never witnessed any tragic sequel to those losses; I never ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... enough—"due to decency," in fact—to wear "mourning," and now and then look grave; but "this idea of closing your house," observed our philosopher, "and silencing your piano, and abstaining from your customary amusements and habits for months [only think of it!], because some one has departed from misery to happiness, is not alone supremely ridiculous [though that is bad enough], but it is sublimely ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... basso of the Opera, accompanied at the piano by one of the unclassified ladies, was just finishing Mephistopheles' drinking song out of Faust when ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... good terms so quickly. We agreed about the wickedness of that boy, especially when Dave reported ingratitude on his part towards the sister, who was tending him, whom he smacked and whose hair he pulled. To think of his smacking that dear girl that played the piano so nicely all day! And pulling her back-tails so she called out when she was actually succouring his lacerated face. I gathered that her name may have been Matilda, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... openly took the field against the family of the butcher. It is true that the Lambs, having had the first start, had naturally an advantage of them in the fashionable career. They could speak a little bad French, play the piano, dance quadrilles, and had formed high acquaintances; but the Trotters were not to be distanced. When the Lambs appeared with two feathers in their hats, the Miss Trotters mounted four and of twice as fine colors. If the Lambs gave a dance, the Trotters were sure not to be behindhand; ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... to dusk, and day by day, did she keep those three keys clicking and clittering, as if her life depended on the result; and so in truth it did, to some extent, for her bread and butter depended on her performances on that very meagre piano. ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... to the sleeping-cabins at the sides were shot away; the handrails were gone, and the elegant carpet was concealed beneath a chaos of fragments of finery. The books on the shelves of the library remained unmoved; the piano was thrown on one side; and the floor presented huge upheaved and rent chasms, through which might be seen the still greater ruin in the lower cabin. Below the saloon, or drawing-room, is the saloon of the lower deck, which was, of course, traversed ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... nine o'clock. At such times, she was accustomed to talk over household affairs with the maid, and after breakfast would visit the kitchen and make a tour of the grounds and garden. The remainder of her day would be spent in reading, in playing the piano, in doing little household tasks, or in walking about the grounds with her father. Yes, sometimes the yogi would join them, and there would be long discussions. After dinner, in the library, there would also be long ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... reserve of energy, a dignified self-respect; there is never any self-abandonment. She has sung first in French, now she comes on in an Italian air, and afterwards is not too coyly reticent in taking an encore which is in English, to a piano accompaniment, and when that is over she hastens to bring the accompanist by the hand to her side before the audience, and bows, sweetly and graciously, with a gesture of the whole body, yet again with a certain reserve, not, ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... the elegantly furnished dining-room in carved oak, the cafe-au-lait upholstered drawing-room, with its superb Chinese vases of fragrant flowers, its cabinet of curiosities, its Delacroix pictures, its rosewood piano, and the portrait of the authoress by Calamatta. What struck him as much as anything was the bedroom in brown, with the bed on the floor in Turkish fashion. He was careful to assure his correspondent that, Chopin ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... the house was not so cheerful and was much colder. An enlarged coloured photograph of the long-deceased Captain Bernard, in the uniform worn by the French artillery at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, hung on one of the walls, over an upright piano; it had a black frame, and was decorated with a wreath of everlasting daisies tied with a black bow. Underneath the portrait a tiny holy-water basin of old Tyrolese pewter was fastened to the wall. This Madame Bernard filled every year at Easter, when the parish priest came to ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... of a naive race, singing what they have seen or dreamed or felt during three hundred years. The work is dedicated to Goethe, who wrote an almost enthusiastic review of it for the Literary Gazette of Jena. "Every lover or master of musical art," he says, "should have this volume upon his piano." ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... unaware whether you are listening to him or not. He is not a fool. A fool is occasionally amusing— Longrush never. No subject comes amiss to him. Whatever the topic, he has something uninteresting to say about it. He talks as a piano-organ grinds out music steadily, strenuously, tirelessly. The moment you stand or sit him down he begins, to continue ceaselessly till wheeled away in cab or omnibus to his next halting-place. As in the case of his prototype, his rollers are changed about once a month to suit the ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... with him to the landing, where she kept him for about ten minutes complaining of the awful worry she had had about the under-housemaid, and of the sickening impossibility of getting a piano-tuner to attend to the instrument properly without making ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... wood and the worn red velvet—low bookshelves lining the walls, a grand piano on a cover by the window. In the dimness Jean's copper head shone like the halo of a saint. Mary decided that Derry was "queer-looking," until gathering courage, she went in and ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... sang and one of the ladies plucked a sparkling fandango, and then Chydister Lundsford was called upon for a speech. He was not at all embarrassed and he talked fairly well; and when he was done they called upon me. I got up with one hand resting on the piano, and stood there, nervous at first, but strangely steady later on. I told them that I could not make a speech, but that with their permission I would tell them a story, one of my own. They cried out that they would rather have a story than a speech, and I gave them ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... a piano in one corner, and muslin curtains—I give you my word, muslin curtains, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... centre of the room with a long paper wand, which can be made of a newspaper folded up lengthways, and tied at each end with string. The other players then join hands and stand round him in a circle. Someone then plays a merry tune on the piano and the players dance round and round the blind man, until suddenly the music stops; the blind man then takes the opportunity of lowering his wand upon one of the circle, and the player upon whom it has fallen has to take ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... unusually keen and alert, intuitive to a degree, and while Aunt Lucinda's manner was all that could be desired, she felt that she had been a disappointment in some way. She rose a little wearily and going to the piano ran her fingers over ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... pit for ever in her ears! I, Rameau, son of Rameau, the apothecary of Dijon, who is a good man and never yet bent his knee to a creature in the world! I, Rameau, who have composed pieces for the piano that nobody plays, but which will perhaps be the only pieces ever to reach posterity, and posterity will play them—I, I, must go! Stay, sir, it cannot be [and striking his right hand on his breast, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... when they are grown in pots; nor can there be so much re-arrangement and change when these are required—and what good housekeeper is not a natural born scene shifter, every once in so often rolling the piano around to the other side of the room, and moving the bookcase or changing the big Boston fern over to the other window, so it can be seen from ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... it, then, with cedah and polish it so well that laik the mirrors it will reflect her face as she walks about. Heah will be the music room. It shall have a piano made of the same rich wood. It will look as if it were built in the house. Theah shall be guitahs and mandolins. She plays the guitah a little, Cyclona, the Princess. You should see her small white hands as she fingahs the strings. I will have a low divan of many ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... going to sing,' she warned him as a gaunt girl went towards the piano; and sinking on to a convenient and sheltered couch, they resigned themselves to listen—or to endure. From that corner Rose had a view of the long room, mediocre in its decoration, mediocre in its occupants. She could see her ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... the apologetic air of Marie. The room looked as neat as I had imagined it, seeing it from the mirror of Marie's mind. I should say it scarcely needed that broom which still remained expectantly in Marie's hand. A piano, spider-legged, in the number and thinness of these supports, stood at one side of the room, weighed down with classic-looking music. A bouquet, that had been given by the hand of the prima donna to Marie, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... of chums, the love of your wife, and a new piano's tune— Which of the three will you trust at the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... the elaborately carved porch. She looked round the brown hall where deep shadows lurked. Oak chests and carved chairs, all more or less dusty, stood about, looking as if disorderly feasters had just left them. In one corner was an inlaid sideboard piano. ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... play, however, I must mention that my wife does not endorse all this. On the contrary, she tells me (she has a terse way of speaking) that it is "rank bosh." She declares that the Dirzee is the bane of her life, that he is worse than a fly, that she cannot sit down to the piano for five minutes but he comes buzzing round for black thread, or white thread, or mother-o-pearl buttons, or hooks and eyes, that every evening for the last month he has watched her getting ready for to drive, and just as her foot was on the carriage step, has reminded her, with a cough, ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... up-to-date young woman with whom a friendly flirtation was just what it was with white womankind—the pleasant amusement of an hour or season. It was a mistake—a very big mistake. Tannis understood something of piano playing, something less of grammar and Latin, and something less still of social prevarications. But she understood absolutely nothing of flirtation. You can never get an Indian to see the sense ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... played on the piano and the children march from their seats in single file around the room. As soon as the music stops, all rush to get into their seats. The last one in, must remain in his seat during the second trial. If there is no piano in the room, drumming on the top of ...
— School, Church, and Home Games • George O. Draper
... him and often halted there on hunting expeditions, so they went into the house—very nicely furnished, a pretty parlour with muslin curtains, a piano, and everything pleasant; and Joel Lea called his wife, a handsome, fair young woman. Bertram says from the first she put him in mind of some one, and he was trying to make out who it could be. Then came the wife's mother, a neat little delicate, bent woman, with dark ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... moving garden, the sides being first wound with strong twine, and into this were thrust all sorts of flowers in great, loose bunches. Only the softest foliage, in branches, was utilized, as Tillie felt responsible for the luster of the "piano" polish, for which the Whirlwind was remarkable. The top of the car was like a roof garden, the effect being quite simply managed, for Tillie was resourceful. She had stretched across the roof of the car a strong sheet of pasteboard. Into this she placed a great variety of wild flowers, banking ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose
... at one time to learn the piano, as in that day every girl was, to the saddening of human existence and the torturing of human nerves. After taking a few lessons Barbara was shrewd enough to discover that she had no musical gifts worth cultivating. She therefore ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... sir, you hunt him up again—he will no doubt be in his office across the street. Get his consent, as I before suggested—Castleton is always obliging when you appeal to him directly; then take your supper, and be ready. I will be here at eight o'clock with my horse and a piano-box buggy. It will be a beautiful moonlight night, and let us not risk waiting until to-morrow. We will take with us some ice; also wine, beef extract, and a few other things intended to sustain the poor old ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... very ugly fashion it is. A lady does not know what to do with her two or three bouquets at a musicale or a dinner, so they are laid away on a table. The only thing that can be done is to sit after dinner with them in her lap, and the prima donna at a musicale lays hers on the grand piano. ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... expression of unrestrained physical abandon. Lane walked along the edge of this circling, wrestling melee, down to the corner where the orchestra held forth. They seemed actuated by the same frenzy which possessed the dancers. The piccolo player lay on his back on top of the piano, piping his shrill notes at the ceiling. And Lane made sure this player was drunk. On the moment then the jazz came to an end with a crash. The lights flashed up. The dancers clapped and stamped ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... was five years old the 21st of January, and I had such a happy birthday. In the morning when I got up I found at the foot of my crib six books of natural history full of pictures for little folks, a piano, a box of colors, and two dancing bears, one black and one brown. And when I went down to the dining-room, on my tray was a beautiful cup and saucer, and on the cup, in gold letters, "A Gift." And ...
— Harper's Young People, February 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... you I'd give you something better than the Journal would give you, and I am going to give you a happy day in the country. We're now on our way to this lady's house. You are my guest, and you can play golf, and bridge, and the piano, and eat and drink until the polls close, and after that you can go to the devil. If you jump out at this speed, you will break your neck. And, if I have to slow up for anything, and you try to get away, I'll go after you—it doesn't matter where it is—and break ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... rather a warm day in autumn. Aunt Cheerie had given the sewing-machine and the piano a holiday, and was sitting in the woodshed, paring apples for preserves. Wherever Aunt Cheerie was, the children were sure to be; and so there was Sunbeam, knife in hand, and Fairy, cutting a paring something less than half an inch thick, while the dear ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... close at hand. First the cornet picks out some air he has heard, note by note, and like a child who is learning the piano, always goes back to the beginning of the piece when he strikes a false note. After many trials the whole air is discovered. Then the trombones and bass instruments put in the accompaniment also by experiment, and in the end the result is really ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... Jemima Turnbull contributed in turn their share toward the evening's entertainment by singing "Hearts of Oak," "The Bay of Biscay," "Then farewell my trim-built wherry," and other songs of a similar character, to a somewhat uncertain accompaniment upon a discordant jangling old piano—the chief merit of which was that a large proportion of its notes were dumb. Their gallant father meanwhile sipped his grog and puffed away at his "church-warden" in a high-backed uncomfortable-looking chair in a ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... applies in a general way to every state and every home. Look about, where you are sitting now. How many things are there in the room just where you are,—there is a table, a chair, a shoe, a coat, a necktie, a cigar, a lampshade, a piano, a basket—for all of these ...
— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson
... you mean? Why, Jamie, just a pencil and paper, so—that isn't like learning to play the piano or violin!" ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... wood, of the kinds used in delicate cabinet-work and were polished until they shone. The floor was covered with fine straw matting, and around the room were ranged easy-chairs and sofas of willow and rattan. In one corner stood a piano in an ebony case, and on a koa-wood centre-table were a number of fine photographs and works of art. Hanging baskets filled with blooming plants hung in each window and in the veranda. Altogether, it was the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... playing to your little boy, Mrs. Carr," she said with the manner which Miss Polly had described as "flighty." "He came into my room when he heard the piano, and it was a real ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... bare room in a boarding house. To the left is a bed, to the right a grand piano—the latter curiously out of keeping with the other cheap furnishings. The room ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... to appear so," said the wife. "To complete this room, and make it look like other people's we want a piano ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... question whether our intellects can grasp the subject. Are we perhaps like a child whose hand is too small to span an octave on the piano? Not only are the facts inhumanly complicated, but the natural ideals of people are so varied and contradictory that action halts in despair. We are putting a tremendous strain upon the mind, and the results are all about us: everyone has known the neutral thinkers who stand forever undecided ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... They are brought up with songs; for I wished early, as it were, to bathe their souls in harmony. Several of them, especially my first-born and Eva, are regular little enthusiasts in music; and every evening, as soon as twilight comes on, the children throng about me, and then I sit down to the piano, and either accompany myself, or play to little songs which they themselves sing. It is my Henrik's reward, when he has been very good for the whole day, that I should sit by his bed, and sing to him till he sleeps. He says that ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... a great bother, at best. I wish they could be abolished. They are always slamming, punching holes in the plastering with their knobs, creaking on their hinges, bruising the piano, pinching babies' fingers, and making old folks see stars when they get up in the night to look for burglars. Heavy curtains are infinitely more graceful, equally warm, and not half so stubbornly unmanageable. Then think of entering a room. ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... the dispassionate, if not of the philosophic, historian with which she always recorded the current incidents of her daughter's career. "She got dressed on purpose before dinner. But she's got a friend of hers there; that gentleman—the Italian—that she wanted to bring. They've got going at the piano; it seems as if they couldn't leave off. Mr. Giovanelli sings splendidly. But I guess they'll come before very long," concluded ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... supplies of munitions and engines of war were wormed through. The machine-guns in carefully numbered parts came in cases as "agricultural implements," the big guns travelled in the boilers of locomotives, the empty cases of the shells, large and small, were packed in piano-cases, or in straw-filled crates as "hardware"; the black powder and the cordite and the lyddite came in round wooden American cheese-boxes, with a special mark; and the Mauser cartridges were soldered in tins like preserved meat. How handsomely that ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... head-shaking, and gathering of lips, and reminiscences of ancient arguments, guaranteed to do all that leech could do in the matter. The old doctor did admit that Richard's constitution was admirable, and answered to his prescriptions like a piano to the musician. "But," he said at a family consultation, for Sir Austin had told him how it stood with the young man, "drugs are not much in cases of this sort. Change! That's what's wanted, and as soon as may be. Distraction! He ought to see ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... reached a narrow, five-storied brick house with gay window boxes at every window. A maid opened the door for them and showed them into a pleasant, rather small room where a little girl sat at the grand piano, practicing. ...
— Sunny Boy in the Big City • Ramy Allison White
... she was nine she could play quite creditably a number of simple Etudes on the tinkly old piano which had lost some of its ivories. Her daily practicing was one of the few things about which Barbara was strict. So much attention had been given to her own education in music that she found joy in keeping ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... with one consent, and all, as it were, moved by a sudden impulse, joined first in a country dance, then formed into sets for quadrilles, and finally waltzed away to the old-fashioned sound of Mrs. Meadowsweet's piano, played with vigor by the good lady herself, Captain Bertram, with a beseeching and deprecatory glance at Beatrice, who took care not to see it, led out Miss Matty Bell ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... very happily with commonplace wives, and Robert Worth had never regretted that his Maria did not play on the piano, and paint on velvet, and work fine embroideries for the altars. They had passed nearly twenty-six years together in more than ordinary content and prosperity. Yet no life is without cares and contentions, and Robert Worth had had to face ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... house and garden in the country all to himself. His idea is somewhere near half an acre of ground. He would like a piano in the best room; it has always been his dream to have a piano. The youngest girl, he is convinced, is musical. As a man who has knocked about the world and has thought, he quite appreciates the argument that by co-operation the material side of life can be greatly improved. He quite sees ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Piano and being unable to divide it fairly without a remainder went to law about it and continued the contest as long as either one could steal a dollar to bribe the judge. When they could give no more an Honest Man came along and by a single small payment obtained a judgment and took ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... are said to have used its bark for the roofs of cottages, for baskets, and for a kind of paper called Philyra. They also made bucklers of its wood, "on account of its flexibility, lightness, and resiliency." It was once much used for carving, and is still in demand for sounding-boards of piano-fortes and panels of carriages, and for various uses for which toughness and flexibility are required. Baskets and cradles are made of the twigs. Its sap affords sugar, and the honey made from its flowers is said to be preferred to any other. Its leaves are in some countries given to ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... many, whose fortunes were said to be ample, Miss Lily De Lusian may serve as a sample: She'd a smatter of French, and a languishing air, While of sense she possessed but a limited share. She played the piano remarkably well, And by all of her friends was considered a belle. And perhaps it was so, for she certainly 'told,' In the set where she moved, on ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... satisfied that the New England schools were good enough for her. This was Helen; but Katy was different. Katy was more susceptible of polish and refinement—so the mother thought; and as she arranged and rearranged the little parlor, lingering longest by the piano, Dr. Morris' gift, she drew bright pictures of her favorite child, wondering how the plain farmhouse and its inmates would seem to her after Canandaigua and all she must have seen during her weeks of travel since the close of the summer term. And then she ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... that—that Laurie thought very pretty, and she had a restless little way of playing with her fingers as if on a piano. Oh, my dear, it would have been too dreadful; and now, ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... becomes aware of people. Usually the crowds and their endless faces are a background. They circle around one the way ripples circle around a stone that has fallen into the water. The torments, elation of others; the ambitions, defeats of others; the bedlam of others—who the piano. A cornet, probably. Or a ukulele. Parbleu, what creates in the plunge from ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... old-fashioned hat rack flanked the door on one side, a tall clock on the other. I saw in passing framed steel engravings. The room beyond contained easy chairs, a sofa upholstered with hair cloth, an upright piano, a marble fireplace with a mantel, in a corner a triangular what-not filled with objects. It, too, was dim and curtained and faintly aromatic as had been the house of an old maiden aunt of my childhood, who used to give me cookies on the Sabbath. ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... evening when the young Polish violinist, whom I have already mentioned, asked me to play with him Beethoven's sonata for piano and violin, dedicated to Kreuzer, his favourite piece, which he had long been unable to play for want of ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... and ennui were considered etiquette last winter, in a certain society, which was thrown into mourning by the July revolution. Reunions were very few; there were no balls or soirees; dancing in drawing-rooms to the piano was hardly permissible, even with intimate friends. When once I was installed in Mademoiselle de Corandeuil's drawing-room upon a friendly footing, this cessation of worldly festivities gave me an opportunity to see Clemence in a rather ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... secretary has computed the rate, if you listen closely you can almost hear the buzz of multiplications and additions which is going on in each man's head as he calculates exactly how much the addition will mean to him in taxes on his farm, his daughter's piano ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... probabilmente soltanto la prima" (UZIELLl).]; the second is that two third ones above are over the two third ones below [Footnote 10: terze di sotto: "Intende qui senza dubbio parlare di foglie decussate, in cui il terzo verticello e nel piano del primo" (UZIELLI).]; and the third way is that the third above is over the third below [Footnote 11: 3a di sotto: "Disposizione ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... Every successful new medium has traded off its artifact-ness — the degree to which it was populated by bespoke hunks of atoms, cleverly nailed together by master craftspeople — for ease of reproduction. Piano rolls weren't as expressive as good piano players, but they scaled better — as did radio broadcasts, pulp magazines, and MP3s. Liner notes, hand illumination and leather bindings are nice, but they pale in comparison to the ability of an individual ...
— Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books • Cory Doctorow
... Lord Garrow's tea and cut the leaves of the Revue des Deux Mondes, which he invariably read until he dressed for dinner, she stole away to the further room, where she could play the piano, write letters, muse over novels, or indulge in reverie without fear of interruption. But as she entered it that afternoon its air of peace seemed the bleakness of desolation. A terrible and afflicting grief ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... of mind of a savage who might find upon a shore, washed up by the same storm, buoyant parts of a piano and a paddle that was carved by cruder hands than his own: something light and summery from India, and a fur overcoat from Russia—or all science, though approximating wider and wider, is attempt to conceive of India in terms of an ocean island, and of Russia in ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... with D'Israeli, and in the afternoon we partly walked and partly rode to Islington, to drink tea with Mrs. Lindo, who, with Mr. L. and her family, were well pleased to see me. Mr. Cervetto was induced to accompany the ladies at the piano with his violoncello, which he did delightfully. We walked home at 10 o'clock. On Saturday we passed a very pleasant day at Petersham with Turner ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... out-curve, but in delivery the hand is brought almost directly over the shoulder. In all curves the pitcher must have extremely sensitive fingers and be able to control them with almost as much skill as one requires in playing a piano. We must keep in mind which way we desire the ball to spin to produce the required curve and then to give it just as much of this spin as we can without interfering ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... a bored musician, listening to the piano-antics of defective children, might have regarded the playing of a disguised Paderewski. Wherefore, he had waved the dog to one side while he judged the lesser entrants, and then had given him ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... softly through the sky. But regularly they dipped their wings in pitch black; Notting Hill, for instance, or the purlieus of Clerkenwell. No wonder that Italian remained a hidden art, and the piano always played the same sonata. In order to buy one pair of elastic stockings for Mrs. Page, widow, aged sixty-three, in receipt of five shillings out-door relief, and help from her only son employed in Messrs. Mackie's dye-works, suffering in winter with his chest, letters must ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... to a piano with a friend, the pathetic ballad of Mozart's "Vergiss me nicht,"[46] a few days previous to quitting ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... giving utterance to her will, Ginevra affected inconceivable coolness. She opened the piano and sang, played charming nocturnes and scherzos with a grace and sentiment which displayed a perfect freedom of mind, thus triumphing over her father, whose darkling face showed no softening. The old man was cruelly hurt by this tacit insult; ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... "Les fleurs! C'est la vie parfumee." Waiting for the breakfast to be served, he showed us about in his apartment. In the salon, rather primly furnished, stood the grand piano. The bookshelves contained Cherubini's (his master) and his own operas, and his beloved Bach. A table in the middle of the room, covered with photographs and engravings, completed ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... and milk, and no sleeping quarters better than the storehouse. But here he was entertained, as the agent wrote, in Virginia fashion where a call lasts six months and a visit one year; and the nights were made merry with the music of the violin and piano, and with the animated conversation of Taliaferro and Nicollet. For many hours on cold winter nights he studied through his telescope the stars in the ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... a hundred miles around for one last spree before round-up time. As the stage rolled down the single street the festivities were in full swing. From one lighted doorway came the blare of a mechanical piano accompanied by the scrape of feet; the sound of drunken voices raised in song issued from the next; the shrill laughter of a dance-hall girl, the purr of the ivory ball and the soft clatter of chips, the ponies drowsing at the hitch rails ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... small-paned windows outlined in white on the grey walls, its low raftered rooms, and with a few washes of colour—pure blue, white, daffodil yellow—had made all bright within, to match the bright spaces of air and light without. There was some Westmorland oak, some low chairs, a sofa and a piano from the old Manchester house, some etchings and drawings, hung on the plain walls by Farrell himself, with the most fastidious care; and a few—a very few things—from his own best stores, which Hester allowed him to 'house' ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... head. I had no more to say. Unwilling I was to die—afraid I was not; for, as I sat there, my whole life swept before me, as it is said to do before the eyes of the drowning, and rapidly as one may sweep the gamut on a piano with one introverted finger, and I saw myself as though I had been another. I had done nothing to make me afraid to meet my God; so, with closed eyes, I lingered in the shadow, conscious of nothing save exceeding calm, when the grasp of my gentle friend ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... the relish of certain of the dishes, there was yet the assurance of such power in the preparation of the whole, that we knew her to be merely running over the chords of our appetite with preliminary savors, as a musician acquaints his touch with the keys of an unfamiliar piano before breaking into brilliant and triumphant execution. Within a week she had mastered her instrument; and thereafter there was no faltering in her performances, which she varied constantly, through inspiration or from suggestion.... But, after all, it was in puddings that Mrs. Johnson chiefly ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... Summer Homeward came the fair Miranda. How the village people wonder'd At her fashions, and her movements, How she made the new piano Tremble to its inmost centre With andante, and bravura, What a piece she had to show them Of Andromache the Trojan, Wrought in silks of every color, And 'twas said a foreign language Such as princes use in Paris, She could speak ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... encasement, it was no wonder that they valued the body less and held mind as of great value. They failed to see that mind without a material organ of expression is, in this world, of no account. A great pianist with no piano could not make music, and he would be considered a strange being if he did not care for his instrument most scrupulously. Think of a Rubinstein voluntarily breaking the piano strings or smashing the keys, while he made discordant poundings, and excusing ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... throw his heavy boots on the floor in the next room, I realized that I was left all alone with their charming daughter. All my fears of the early part of the evening tried to crowd on me again, but were calmed by the girl, who sang and played on the piano with no audience but me. Then she interested me by telling her school experiences, and how glad she was that they were over. Finally she lugged out a great big family album, and sat down aside of me on one of these horsehair sofas. That album had a clasp on it, a buckle of pure silver, same as ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... the walls of which were covered with pearl-gray paper with a design of golden flowers, while the furniture consisted of some of those white lacquered Louis XVI. pieces which makers turn out by the gross. The rosewood piano showed like a big black blot amidst all the rest. Then, overlooking the Boulevard de Grenelle, came Reine's bedroom, pale blue, with furniture of polished pine. Her parents' room, a very small apartment, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... how, after some classical or fashionable music had been played, Landor would come closer to the piano and ask for an old English ballad, and when "Auld Robin Gray," his favourite of all, was sung, the tears would stream down his face. "Ah, you don't know what thoughts you are recalling to the ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... the sort that wore trimmed dresses and rolled about in handsome carriages. Just in the centre and height of the thoroughfare Mme. Ricard's establishment looked over it. We went in at a stately doorway, and were shown into a very elegant parlour; where at a grand piano a young lady was taking a music lesson. The noise was very disagreeable; but that was the only disagreeable thing in the place. Pictures were on the walls, a soft carpet on the floor; the colours of carpet and furniture ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... a friend who wonders that I do not take my astronomical clock to pieces. She supposes that because I am an astronomer, I must be able to be a clock-maker, while I do not handle a tool if I can help it! She did not expect to take her piano to pieces because she was musical! She was as careful not to tinker it as I was not to tinker the clock, which only an expert in clock-making was prepared ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... owner of Hermitage, was a single man. He was old, feeble, and notoriously grasping, yet the dirty, ill-smelling room which Religion entered was strewn with choicest books, sheets of music lay on the table and chairs, and several rare violins lay on a piano, whose mother-of-pearl keys glowed in the ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... Carmen had quietly risen and taken her place at the piano. When he concluded, she began to play and sing softly. As the sweet melody flowed out through the room the little group became silent and thoughtful. Again it was that same weird lament which the girl had sung long before in the Elwin school to voice the emotions which surged up in her during ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... never been followed out as they should be, and might be, if the subject were pursued scientifically as other questions in science are.) Again, might not telepathy be facilitated if we chose individuals of the same general temperament? If we chose two individuals to whom the same chord on the piano appealed (say the common chord of G minor or C sharp), and this chord were struck repeatedly, might not telepathic transmission be facilitated under such conditions? If both subjects were hypnotized, and the agent were told to "will" certain ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... waifs and strays from a former home, the grimy faces of the old articles exercising a curious and subduing effect on the bright faces of the new. An oval mirror of rococo workmanship, and a heavy cabinet-piano with a cornice like that of an Egyptian temple, adjoined a harmonium of yesterday, and a harp that was almost as new. Printed music of the last century, and manuscript music of the previous evening, lay there in such quantity as ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... merchant. He had been a sealer himself, and finally abandoned mercantile life in Sydney to return to his old haunts, where he managed his own establishment, joined farming to whaling, endowed a mission station,[1] and amazed the land by importing a black-coated tutor and a piano for his children. Moreover, the harpooners and oarsmen were not paid wages or paid in cash, but merely had a percentage of the value of a catch, and were given that chiefly in goods and rum. For this ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... main-hatch. On one occasion I had an hour or so of a most intellectual conversation with a person whom I could not see distinctly, a gentleman from England, he said, with a cultivated voice, I on deck and he on the quay sitting on the case of a piano (landed out of our hold that very afternoon), and smoking a cigar which smelt very good. We touched, in our discourse, upon science, politics, natural history, and operatic singers. Then, after remarking abruptly, "You seem to be ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... doctors had been in Albania, on an inoculating expedition. At Durazzo he had been received by Essad Pacha, who was delighted to have his piano played, and to watch the hammers working inside. Like Helen's babies, "he wanted to see the wheels go wound." The piano and piles of music must have been a memento of the Prince and Princess of Wied and of their unhappy attempts ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... some importance in the consideration of the design of furniture. Messrs. Broadwood's Grand Pianoforte (illustrated) was a rich example of decorative woodwork in ebony and gold, and may be compared with the illustration on p. 172 of a harpsichord, which the Piano had replaced about 1767, and which at and since the time of the 1851 Exhibition supplies evidence of the increased attention devoted to decorative furniture. In the Appendix will be found a short notice of the different phases through which the ever-present piano ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... warmly for an hour or two: ladies of low degree scuttled like rats and panders dashed for safety, while "owners" in princely motorcars turned almost as white as their livers as they saw their "warehouses of virtue" going up in flame. Two incidents are very vivid—the sight of a grand piano tumbling out of a five-story window and one of the aforesaid "owners" trying to remonstrate with the avengers, and having his car run into the fire. The military police tried to interfere early in the game, but only made matters worse, as they were pretty well hated by the boys as being ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... juggler. There were young ladies, old ladies, ladies of the harem and of the ballet; there were all races and colours. Pipers played the reels, an orchestra of eight from the Divisional band, with Pte. Williams at the piano, the other dance music. A well-stocked buffet did a roaring trade. And we all thought there had never ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... grunting in every direction as they lay in wait for him, until at last he gained the broad gravel path, at the end of which—oh, how far away they seemed!—were the three lighted windows of the drawing-room. He could see the interior quite plainly, and the group round the piano where the shaded lamp made a spot of brilliant colour. What were they all doing? Were they huddled together, waiting, watching in an agony of suspense? Nothing of the kind: it will be scarcely credited, perhaps, but this heartless domestic ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... at one time would spend days at his piano engrossed in the creation of new tunes. Showers of melody would stream from under his dancing fingers, while Akshay Babu and I, seated on either side, would be busy fitting words to the tunes as they grew into shape to help to hold them in our memories.[34] This is how I served my apprenticeship ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... of some feast lay about the room, scattered in places where even a prowling cat would have been surprised to find them. A straggling cluster of deep red roses in a marmalade jar bowed their heads over tobacco ashes and unwashed goblets. A chafing-dish stood on the piano; a leaf of sheet music supported a stack of sandwiches in ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... himself he was in terror lest his broad shoulders should collide with the doorways or sweep the bric-a-brac from the low mantel. He recoiled from side to side between the various objects and multiplied the hazards that in reality lodged only in his mind. Between a grand piano and a centre-table piled high with books was space for a half a dozen to walk abreast, yet he essayed it with trepidation. His heavy arms hung loosely at his sides. He did not know what to do with those arms ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... well enough to be downstairs in the parlor, and this was a pleasant room, too. It seemed strange to the children to think it was their own old parlor, for it was so differently arranged. There was a large piano at which Diana practiced when she was well enough. It took up the side of the room where their mother's writing-desk had been. Their piano was an upright one, and it had been on the opposite side of the room. Small as it was, it almost filled up one ...
— Peggy in Her Blue Frock • Eliza Orne White
... the orders given to naval commanders in that department,* to burn all picket-stations, and all villages from which I should be covertly attacked, and nothing else; and as this house was destined to the flames, I should have left the piano in it, but for the seductions of that box. With such a receptacle all ready, even to the cover, it would have seemed like flying in the face of Providence not to put the piano in. I ordered it removed, therefore, and afterwards presented it to the school for colored children at Fernandina. This ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... of her setting of gaiety, of a thumping piano, of chattering, giggling crowds, of dancing and bridge and theater boxes, was a queen dethroned. She did not read or think. She spent the leisure of her mourning period in long hours before her mirror fussing with her hair, in trimming and retrimming hats, ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... over to the open piano in one corner of the room. Nora had taken music and so was the pianist of the family. She struck the opening chords, and then they all joined in singing ...
— The Quest of Happy Hearts • Kathleen Hay
... stood on easels, leaned against chair backs, glowed from the wall—each contributing to the atmosphere of solved rainbow that seemed to fill the space. Lenorme was seated—not at his easel, but at a grand piano, which stood away, half hidden in a corner, as if it knew itself there on sufferance, with pictures all about the legs of it. For they had walked straight in without giving his servant time to announce them. A bar of a song, in a fine tenor voice, ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... journals; there was a secretaire book-case in Chippendale by the side of the enormous fire-place, in which a great coal fire burned; and above this was an ivory overmantel of exquisite work. A grand piano, open and bearing music, was the chief ornament of the left-hand corner; while another Chippendale cabinet, filled with a multitude of rare curiosities, completed an apartment which had many of the characteristics of a salon and not a few of ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... it. If those people next door will sell their player piano, I'll agree to have my ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... all the young people of our happy century, has been accustomed, for three or four consecutive years, to press her fingers on the keys of a piano, a long-suffering instrument. She has hammered out Beethoven, warbled the airs of Rossini and run through the exercises of Crammer. I had already taken pains to convince her of the excellence of music; to attain this end, I have applauded her, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... this she will have to sacrifice some of her present intelligence; it is impossible to imagine a genuinely intelligent human being becoming a competent trial lawyer, or buttonhole worker, or newspaper sub-editor, or piano tuner, or house painter. Women, to get upon all fours with men in such stupid occupations, will have to commit spiritual suicide, which is probably much further than they will ever actually go. Thus a shade of their present superiority to men will always remain, and with it ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... Jaffrey sententiously, "should n't saw off the legs of the piano in Tobias's best parlor. I don't know what Tobias will say when he finds ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... nothing but the King, and how glad he was to have seen him. In the evening, however, one of the young ladies began to play a hornpipe, the music of which Sir Henry, not without difficulty, had procured for her. True Blue pricked up his ears, and then, running to the piano, exclaimed, "You play it very well indeed, Miss Julia—that you do; but I wish that you could just hear Sam Smatch with his fiddle—he'd take the shine out of you, I think you'd say. Howsomdever, my lady, if you and the young ladies and Sir Henry please, and Miss Julia will just strike up a ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... a call should not, while waiting for a hostess, touch an open piano, walk about the room examining pictures, nor handle any ornament ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... the story out like gentlemen, And said the right thing—almost looked it too! Though all the while within them laughed a sea Of student mirth, which for full half an hour They stifled well, but then could hold no more, As soon their mad piano testified: While in the kitchen dinner was toward With hiss and bubble from the cooking stove, And now a laugh from John ran up the stairs, And a ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... into the parlor and opened the grand piano. He sat down before it, touched a few of the keys casually, then sang, with great expression, the song by J.R. Thomas entitled "Pleasant Memories." He next wandered into the library, and took down ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... P. M., the sub-normal grades entertained their friends. Promptly at 12 m., they filed into the chapel to a march from the piano. Music, recitations, gesture and sewing songs pleasantly filled an hour and a half. A composition, "The New Colony," weaving in, in a humming fashion, the surnames of some of the teachers and pupils, was highly appreciated by the crowded house of ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 08, August, 1885 • Various
... moved frequently across the picture—a bent, tired, work-warped woman—his mother. The pitiable leanness of the life of Hiram's mother had been appalling. One word stood for the tenor of her days from sun to sun—nothing. She had never seen a piano or a typewriter, or even a washing machine. Silent, unmurmuring, she had given her life for ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... evening she was seated by the piano, drawing thence a flood of melody, while her Cousin Edward and George Saville stood beside her. But the attention of the latter seemed more absorbed by the fair musician than by the sweet sounds produced by her flying fingers; and directing his companion's attention to the soft brown ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... exquisitely done up in Eastern style, with an arched roof, screens of wonderfully carved wood brought from Upper Egypt, Persian hangings and embroideries, divans and prayer rugs, on which nobody ever prayed. Lord Reggie and Mr. Amarinth both played the piano in an easy, tentative sort of way, making excess of expression do duty for deficiencies of execution, and covering occasional mistakes with the soft rather than with the loud pedal. Lord Reggie played a hymn of his own, which he frankly acknowledged ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the tinkle of a piano out of tune, the blare of a five-piece orchestra, and the raucous singing of girls who had lost their voices as significantly as other things. And beyond that, along shadowy corridors, were other girls standing or sitting ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... "I should like to be a piano teacher, when I grow up, for then I shall be able to learn to play many ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... Mamma sold the brougham and the piano, and stripped the house, and curtailed the allowance of crockery for the daily meals, and took long council together over a bundle of letters ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... easy to see from the white, set look of her face as the monotonous months dragged on that she was no nearer to accomplishing that task than on the day of her arrival. Nothing that Knight could do made any difference. When an upright cottage piano appeared one day, the girl seemed ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... and Fairmount Water Works and Park, four objects which Americans cannot die peacefully, even in Naples, without having seen. But Ruth confessed that she was tired of them, and also of the Mint. She was tired of other things. She tried this morning an air or two upon the piano, sang a simple song in a sweet but slightly metallic voice, and then seating herself by the open window, read Philip's letter. Was she thinking about Philip, as she gazed across the fresh lawn over the tree tops to the Chelton Hills, or of that world which ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... and cast furtive glances to see what Vankin was doing. Vankin stood near the piano and, deftly bending down, whispered something to the inspector's sister-in-law, who ...
— The Slanderer - 1901 • Anton Chekhov
... of exactly the same character—like nothing else in all the world so much as an orchestra tuning up! And yet by way of modification (as usual) it must be said that appreciation of Western music is growing, and one seldom hears in classical selections a sweeter combination of voice and piano than Mrs. Tamaki Shibata's, while my Japanese student-friend has also surprised me by singing "Suwanee River" and other old-time American favorites like ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... generalization that explains the reason why many things, harmless in themselves are unpleasant to and offend the taste of cultivated people. No really cultivated young girl will, for instance, open and play upon a piano in a hotel parlor or any other parlor at inappropriate times or when it is occupied by strangers. She will never perform in public any of the duties of the toilet, such as cleaning her nails or using a ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... some respects a most annoying feature of this final task of the day, viewed from the secretary's standpoint, was that from nine to ten, almost without cessation, Mr. Mann, the German secretary, played the piano in the dining saloon, the doors communicating with ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... now, ascending three steps, they went through a curtained recess into Angela Sovrani's studio,—a large and lofty apartment made beautiful by the picturesque disorder and charm common to a great artist's surroundings. Here, at a grand piano sat Angela herself, her song finished, her white hands straying idly over the keys,—and near her stood the gentleman whom the Abbe Vergniaud had called "a terrible reformer and Socialist" and who was generally admitted to be something of a remarkable ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... in the business quarter of Calcutta. It was the business quarter, and yet the air was gay with the dimpling of piano notes, and looking up one saw the bright sunlight fall on yellow stuccoed flats above the shops and the offices. There the pleasant north wind blew banners of muslin curtains out of wide windows, and little gardens of palms in pots showed behind the balustrades ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... you may have heard of. Take a block of ice. Connect a couple of ten-pound weights together with a few feet of piano wire and loop it across the ice block to that the weights hang free on either side, with the wire over the top of the block. The wire will cut right through the ice in a short time. The trouble is that the ice block remains whole—because the ice melts under the pressure of the ...
— Thin Edge • Gordon Randall Garrett
... income-tax assessments show," says The Times,[50] speaking of Berlin after nine months of war, "that among the trades which have suffered most are fruiterers, breweries, public-houses, bars, cafes, chemists and perfumers, goldsmiths and silversmiths, jewellers, milliners, furniture and piano dealers, and music and booksellers. Landowners, land speculators, builders and the carrying trade have also suffered." We may also notice that in the early months of the war Florence, the great market of the shoddy "souvenir" and the "tourist's delight," ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... we've done right," she said as they drove off to fetch her boxes: "the rooms will be like a home, you see if they aren't. And there's a piano too. And Madame Bianchi, isn't she a darling; Isn't she ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... brush? Since the natures of the two means differ, it does not stultify the water-color that it cannot run the deep gamut of oil. Even if the church-organ be the grandest and most comprehensive of musical instruments we may still be permitted to cherish our piano. Each has its own sphere, its own reason for being. So of the pen,—the piccolo flute of the artistic orchestra. Let it pipe its high treble as merrily as it may, but do not coerce it into mimicking ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... drawing-room they went. Frank Headley had been asked up to tea; and he stood at the piano, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... who had just been appointed Secretary of the Foreign Office in the provincial capital by the new revolutionary party. His qualifications for the post consisted chiefly in the fact that, having been employed by a foreign firm as piano-tuner, he could make himself understood in the English tongue ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... just as they were playing the game called "Jump on the piano, and play a queer tune," there came a knock ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Adventures • Howard R. Garis
... rose out of its furrow in the gravel, righting itself to the perpendicular as it came. Anticipating the inward swing of it, Dawson was showing his men how to place ties and rails for a short temporary track, and when he gave Darby the stop signal, the hoisting cables were singing like piano strings, and the big engine was swinging bodily in the air in the grip of the crane tackle, poised to a nicety above the ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... carefully and reverently distinguish these comprehensive words, which gather two or more perfectly understood meanings into one chord of meaning, and are harmonies more than words, from the above-noted blunders between two half-hit meanings, struck as a bad piano-player strikes the edge of another note. In English we have fewer of these combined thoughts; so that Shakespeare rather plays with the distinct lights of his words, than melts them into one. So again Bishop Douglas spells, and doubtless spoke, the word "rose," ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... at the perfect polish of that table! It's like the finish of a rosewood piano." He touched the ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... tour of the hotels. In each one you see a large and brilliantly lighted parlor, along the four sides of which are women sitting solemn and stately, in rows three deep, with a man dropped in here and there, about as thick as periods on a page, very young or very old or in white cravats. A piano or a band or something that can make a noise makes it at intervals at one end of the room. They all look as if they were waiting for something, but nothing in particular happens. Sometimes, after the mountain has labored awhile, some little mouse of a boy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... that an electro-magnet would set a tuning-fork humming was new to Bell and very attractive. It appealed at once to him as a student of speech. If a tuning-fork could be made to sing by a magnet or an electrified wire, why would it not be possible to make a musical telegraph—a telegraph with a piano key-board, so that many messages could be sent at once over a single wire? Unknown to Bell, there were several dozen inven-tors then at work upon this problem, which proved in the end to be very elusive. But it gave him at ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... whether they have their origin in the will of the dancer alone, or in some outside force? The daisies in the meadow and the waves of the sea dance because they are agitated by the wind. The little cork automaton upon the sounding board of a piano dances because it is agitated by the vibrations of the strings. The little children in the alleys of a great city seem to be agitated in the same way ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... preparation, and the magician was obliged to pocket her cards, hurry downstairs, get out her lesson books, and write a piece of French translation, while the inquirers into her mysteries also separated, some to practise piano or ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... fried the sausages and boiled the rice back in the tiny den, was a great favorite. At our own restaurant, two Negro women made the best corn-fritters we had ever tasted; a green parrot and a monkey squawked and chattered on the balustrade; a Filipino boy played marches on a cracked piano-forte. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... other curses, to indolence and drunkenness, as the next woe shows. The people described make drinking the business of their lives, beginning early and sitting late. They have a varnish of art over their swinishness, and must have music as well as wine. So, in many a drink-shop in England, a piano or a band adds to the attractions, and gives a false air of aestheticism to pure animalism. Isaiah feels the incongruity that music should be so prostituted, and expresses it by adding to his list of musical instruments 'and wine' as if he would underscore the degradation of the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... were in their glory, and as soon as the breakfast things were out of the way, they prepared for a grand cooking-time. They were handy girls, though they had never heard of a cooking-school, never touched a piano, and knew nothing of embroidery beyond the samplers which hung framed in the parlor; one ornamented with a pink mourner under a blue weeping-willow, the other with this pleasing verse, each word being done in a different color, which gave the ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... to have been an energetic and original man. He was in the habit of appearing at concerts both as violinist and 'cellist. He was unable to play the piano, so when he was conductor of the opera at Lemberg he directed with the violin, and frequently had to play two parts, which gave him great command over his double stops. When the fame of Paganini reached him he set forth to Italy, that he might profit by ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... Of course I don't know all the ins and outs of it, but Horace Lord will get seven thousand pounds, and a sixth share in the piano business. Old Barmby and his son are trustees. They may let Horace have just what they think fit during the next two years. If he wants money to go into business with, they may advance what they like. But for two years he's simply in their hands, to be looked after. And ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... to invest his funds for a time rather than to keep them available as money. However, there are many cases in which persons save for some moderately distant use—such as the purchase of furniture, of a piano, of a house. The safety and convenience of time deposits, combined with the reward of a small rate of interest, cause great sums, in the aggregate, to be deposited as temporary savings, which otherwise would be hoarded in the form of money and ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... corner and came into a narrow street that throbbed with the joyous melody of a piano-organ. His heart leapt up. The roadway bubbled with Jewish children, mainly girls, footing it gleefully in the graying light, inventing complex steps with a grace and an abandon that lit their eyes with sparkles and painted deeper flushes on their olive cheeks. A bounding little bow-legged ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Colonel that his ride was but a forlorn hope. As he lay there, longing so, in the dangerous dark, he went about the library at home in his thought and placed each familiar belonging where he had known it all his life. And as he finished, his mother's head shone darkly golden by the piano; her fingers swept over the keys; he heard all their voices, the dear never-forgotten voices. Hark! They were singing his hymn— little Alice's reedy note lifted above the others—"God ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... more surely and more deeply, and that is to see the one he loves best deprived of her important pleasures, too, as a result of his misconduct. If mother cannot go out in the automobile; if mother cannot play the piano; if mother cannot read to him, or tell him stories; if mother cannot come to the table for her meals;—the sight of this and the knowledge that he is the cause of it, will put a terrible tug on the heart-strings and the conscience. And in extreme cases, if ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... hard and I remembered not to twist off the water-tap handles. Shaving was easy although I had to change razor blades three times in the process. I broke all the teeth out of the comb because it was never intended to be pulled through a thicket of piano wire. ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... mistaken ideas, or vicious indulgences. Shall these, then, be brought beneath the ban of limitless darkness, and exiled from the "many mansions" of our Heavenly Father's and Mother's house? A tiny rap, untraceable to any material source, a table moved by invisible force, a closed and locked piano skillfully played upon by unseen hands; these were the first links in an endless chain of eternal benefits pouring down from the smiling heavens upon the benighted children of earth. Again was ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... greeted her father in the drawing-room, where she was strumming while Eve leaned lovingly on the piano. "My word! We are fine ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... she was ready she descended to the parlor, and sitting down to her piano ran her fingers lightly over the keys. At that moment Frank Cameron entered. He had learned from his cousin, Kate, enough of Fanny's history to make him fear that she never could be aught to him; ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... degradation came uppermost. He had not led an exemplary life, but pride had kept him clear of certain offences, and he had as yet held his word sacred when put upon his honour. It was some minutes before he ventured to join Hetty and Miss Schuyler, who he knew by the sound of the piano were in the hall. ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... solved. George will seek relaxation in driving a motor-car as if the Serbian roads were a racing track; Alexander's relaxation is to hear a new musical play, then to go home and repeat the whole score by heart on his piano. ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... the floors. The main cabin had the great table, as a fixture, in the centre, but that of Eve, somewhat shorter, but of equal width, was free from all encumbrance of the sort. It had its sofas, cushions, mirrors, stools, tables, and an upright piano. The doors of the state-rooms, and other conveniences, opened on its sides and ends. In short, it presented, at that hour, the resemblance of a tasteful boudoir, rather than that of an apartment in ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... few amenities; in our mess we found our principal recreation in reunions with other fraternities at the patisserie or in an occasional mount. Of patisseries that at Bethune is the best; that at Poperinghe the worst. Besides, the former has a piano and a most pleasing Mademoiselle. In the earlier stages of our occupation some of the officers at G.H.Q. did a little coursing and shooting, but there was trouble about delits de chasse, and ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... was in Cork Street. As soon as they entered it the man remarked on its warmth and its cosiness, so agreeable after the November streets. Christine only smiled. It was a long, narrow flat—a small sitting-room with a piano and a sideboard, opening into a larger bedroom shaped like a thick L. The short top of the L, not cut off from the rest of the room, was installed as a cabinet de toilette, but it had a divan. From ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... capricious, full of mischief, obstinate, wore out his whole family. The father, an official who played the piano, got to hate him, took him into a corner of the garden, flogged him with considerable pleasure, and then felt disgusted with himself. The son has grown ...
— Note-Book of Anton Chekhov • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
... lady here and there about Pater or Morelli (who were probably somewhere over there in the dark), confabulating determinedly with people who were pointed out as authors (more of them!), urging other people, who were musical, in the direction of the piano.... ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... his sister. "We never called her so, you especially. 'Wisi' we called her, to the horror of our dear departed mother. Don't you remember, now, how often you said yourself that we must get Wisi to sing with us when mamma played songs for us on the piano, and we could not make it go at all without ...
— Rico And Wiseli - Rico And Stineli, And How Wiseli Was Provided For • Johanna Spyri
... playing the piano in the Sergeants' Mess when the first one dropped. We all jumped up together and rushed out. Then the second one burst and I lost my head and didn't know where I was going. I darted to and fro, tripping over tent-ropes and dashing up against revetments. I never had the wind up so ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... carved porch. She looked round the brown hall where deep shadows lurked. Oak chests and carved chairs, all more or less dusty, stood about, looking as if disorderly feasters had just left them. In one corner was an inlaid sideboard piano. ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... said, "to whom the secret of the game will be intrusted; the others will have to try to guess it. I shall remain in the room with the rest of you, and my assistant will go out. During her absence I shall place my hand on the shoulder of some girl, or upon the piano, or on my own shoulder, and when she returns she shall tell you ...
— Harper's Young People, August 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... increase regularly in length and diminish in height. They are connected at one end with the fibres of the auditory nerve, and Helmholtz has suggested that the waves of sound play on them, like the fingers of a performer on the keys of a piano, each separate arch corresponding to a different sound. We thus obtain a glimpse, though but a glimpse, of the manner in which perhaps we hear; but when we pass on to the senses of smell and taste, all we know ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... give him pleasure, and thus make lighter the difficult task of learning to read. The ruggedness of this task has often been increased by the use of disconnected sentences, or lessons as dry and uninteresting as finger exercises on the piano. It is a sign of promise that the demand for reading matter of interest to the child has come from teachers. I have endeavored to meet this ...
— Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans • Edward Eggleston
... obstructiveness. Festina, but festina lente—perhaps as involving so completely the contradiction in terms which must underlie all modification—is the motto they would assign to organism, and Chi va piano va lontano, they hold to be a maxim as old, if not as the hills (and they have a hankering even after these), at any rate as ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... for a few minutes, when he excused himself, and left the hotel, promising to return in half an hour. Conversation was resumed in the parlor; and presently Mrs. Belgrave started one of the familiar hymns when she found a piano in the room, in which the captain of the Delhi joined with a tremendous ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... have been engendered under the shadow of these hills. The Suffolk Resolves, which were the prelude of the Declaration of Independence, were adopted at the Vose House, which still stands, square and unadorned, easy of access from the sidewalk, as is suitable for a home of democracy. The first piano ever made in this country received its conception and was brought to fulfillment in the Crehore house, which, although still sagging a bit, is by no means out of commission. And Wilde's Tavern, where was formed the public opinion in a day when the forming of ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... just risen from his chair to go to the piano, stopped short and listened. "False alarm. Must be the doctor. One of the maids is sick." He crossed to the piano where Miriam already stood, turning over a pile of music. Having found the song for which she was searching, she ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... can ride anything that goes on four legs. I can dance, and skate, and arrange flowers with taste. I can re-trim a hat, and at a pinch make a whole blouse. I can order a nice meal, and grumble when it is spoiled. I can strum on the piano and paint Christmas cards. I can entertain a house-party ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... broad bar of golden light shone down upon the gay cupid and the sleeping flowers, and from the open window came the lilt of girlish laughter and the rippling strain of the "Spring Song," as Judy's fingers touched the keys of the little piano lightly. ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... held in the autumn of 1894 at Zelazowa Wola, and afterward at Warsaw. This nocturne was addressed by Chopin to his sister Louise, at Warsaw, in a letter from Paris, and was written soon after the production of the two lovely piano concertos, when Chopin was still a very young man. It contains a quotation from his most admired Concerto in F minor, and a brief reference to the charming song known as the Maiden's Wish, two of his sister's favorite melodies. The manuscript of the nocturne was supposed to have ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... got as far as A B ab, while she was at Miss Deeble's; but if she were backward with her book, her other faculties began to be acute. It was down in that empty kitchen that she first felt the enchantment of music. Some one suddenly played the piano overhead and Beth listened spell-bound. Again and again the player played, and always the same thing, practising it. Beth knew every note. Long afterwards she was trying some waltzes of Chopin's, and came upon one with which ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... two hours at the Hotel Dam! Then my companion, Miss Harries, came bustling in with: "Never mind! here's a piano!" and sat down and played "Annie Laurie" very badly until I screamed with laughter. Before the evening came my room was like a bower of roses, and my dear friends in America have been throwing bouquets at me in the same lavish way ever since. ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... first floor of the Rentheim House. The walls are covered with old tapestries, representing hunting-scenes, shepherds and shepherdesses, all in faded colours. A folding-door to the left, and further forward a piano. In the left-hand corner, at the back, a door, cut in the tapestry, and covered with tapestry, without any frame. Against the middle of the right wall, a large writing-table of carved oak, with many books and papers. Further forward on the same side, a sofa with a table and chairs in front of it. ...
— John Gabriel Borkman • Henrik Ibsen
... first visit we were to be the guests of Professor Max Muller, at his fine residence in Norham Gardens. We met there, at dinner, Mr. Herkomer, whom we have recently had with us in Boston, and one or two others. In the evening we had music; the professor playing on the piano, his two daughters, Mrs. Conybeare and her unmarried sister, singing, and a young lady playing the violin. It was a very lovely family picture; a pretty house, surrounded by attractive scenery; scholarship, refinement, ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Rethel showed me a letter from a friend demanding "some easy chairs and a piano for his trench house," and the Major said, "I hear they have music up on the Yser, but the French are too ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the front porch and the living room were scrubbed spotlessly clean. There was a rug on the floor, while a piano across one corner, a chifforobe with mirrored doors, a bureau, and several comfortable chairs completed the room's furnishings. A motley assortment of pictures adorning the walls included: The Virgin Mother, The Sacred ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... the instruments of the orchestra, "additional'' accompaniments have been written for the works of the older masters; such are Mozart's "additional'' accompaniments to Handel's Messiah or those to many of the elder Bach's works by Robert Franz. In common parlance any support given, e.g. by the piano, to a voice or instrument is loosely called an accompaniment, which may be merely "vamped'' by the introduction of a few chords, or may rise to the dignity of an artistic composition. In the history of song the evolution of the art side ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... for a deep breath, "will you please explain to me just my position? When must I go, and—and can I take away the things that Uncle Walter has given to me from time to time? The pictures in my own rooms were given to me on certain birthdays and holidays; the piano he gave me new last Christmas, and I have a ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... year of imprisonment, the lawyer, as far as it was possible to judge from his short notes, suffered terribly from loneliness and boredom. From his wing day and night came the sound of the piano. He rejected wine and tobacco. "Wine," he wrote, "excites desires, and desires are the chief foes of a prisoner; besides, nothing is more boring than to drink good wine alone," and tobacco spoils the air in his room. During the first year the lawyer was sent books of a light character; novels ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... (obstinately). I do not care about the cause, I only look to the result—the rich are divided from the poor. It is ridiculous that an orange-girl should play the piano, and a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... of them, including her betrothed, by his pet name. The whole throng moved through the dining-room to the drawing-room. The hangings in both rooms were different, but the furniture remained the same; Lavretzky recognised the piano; even the same embroidery-frame was standing in the window, in the same position—and almost with the same unfinished bit of embroidery as eight years previously. They made him sit down in a comfortable easy-chair; all seated themselves decorously ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... untruth; and I was obliged to confess that I knew nothing at all respecting my father or my mother. After that 'the bastard'—for such was the name they gave me—was soon condemned to isolation. No one would associate with me during play-time. No one would sit beside me in the school-room. At the piano lesson, the girl who played after me pretended to wipe the keyboard carefully before commencing her exercises. I struggled bravely against this unjust ostracism; but all in vain. I was so unlike these other girls in character and disposition, and I had, moreover, ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... Olives," in 1812; and his colossal Ninth Symphony, with its choral setting of Schiller's "Ode to Joy," in 1824. In addition to his symphonies, his opera, oratorios, and masses, and the immortal group of sonatas for the piano, which were almost revelations in music, he developed chamber music to an extent far beyond that reached by his predecessors, Haydn and Mozart. His symphonies exhibit surprising power, and a marvellous comprehension of the deeper feelings in life and the influences ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... and babies rollicked on the floor of the piazza. Through the open door of the kitchen the colored wife could be seen directing the servants and cooks who were preparing the evening meal. In the parlor, however, was the most enchanting feature, for at a grand piano was poised the belle of the household, and beside the piano where she was playing stood her colored lover, devouring her with his eyes while he abstractedly turned the leaves of her music. Just to ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... some spools or hanks of No. 6 linen shoe thread, metal sockets, a supply of strong piano wire, a quantity of closely-woven silk or cotton cloth, glue, turnbuckles, ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... parlor, Gracie went at once to the piano. She had spent a good deal of Monday, settling the question of what to play, and had chosen the most sparkling music she could find. I am anxious to have it recorded, that, all uncultured as they ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... as he. Privately sometimes I have listened to a cigar, but it has told me nothing. The only way I can tell whether it is good or bad is by smoking it. Even then I could not tell you (without the assistance of the band) whether it was a Sancho Panza or a Guoco Piano. I could only tell you whether I liked it or not, a question of ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... around the saloon. On one side is the bar, at which several persons are standing, drinking with some of the sweet-voiced houris. The barkeeper and proprietor, both in their shirt sleeves, are behind it. On one side of the bar is a slightly-raised platform, upon which is a piano-player, a violinist and a shrill fifer. This is the music that charms and attracts. Around the room are men of all kinds, sailors, laboring men, seedy individuals, lovers, thieves, a few poor gamblers, fellows in hard luck and waiting for "something ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... offensive part of the rural population by social organisation under competent direction. He even got out an old letter and proved to me on the back of it, with a stub of a pencil, what a pitiful outlay in money was sufficient to start a practical boys' club, including the rent of a second-hand piano, to be purchased ultimately on the instalment plan. In the midst of this lecture (it was no less) I fell asleep, uncomfortably and rudely, and it was he who shook me awake at last and carried the bag out of ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... is piano, allegro must be forte, Go wash my neck and sleeves, because this shirt is dirty Mon charmant, prenez guarda, Mind what your signior begs, Ven you wash, don't scrub so harda, You may rub my shirt to rags. Vile you make the water hotter— Uno solo I compose. Put in the pot the nice ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... his astronomical meditations, and thinking more about the celestial than the terrestrial world, when a distant sound aroused him from his reverie. He listened attentively, and to his great amaze, fancied he heard the sounds of a piano. He could not be mistaken, for he ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... Miss Martina B. Cadwallader were examining the armor. Some one was playing the piano softly. Merry laughter floated upward. I doubt if any other country could produce such a scene. ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... spots and arabesques of gold and the satin shimmer of wall-paper, lights and shades of steel engravings, and elegant and graceful lady-treasures of gilded books and work-boxes and vases on shelf and tables. There was even a little piano, the only one in the village, with slender, fluted legs, and a ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... applauded Mrs. Davis' womanly act, else blocked the yawning hole in his prognathic head with a flat-car load of compost. If Mrs. Davis is permitted to petition the King of Kings to have mercy on the miserable journalistic piano-pounder for Gotham's high-toned honk-a-tonks, certainly she may with propriety appeal to the substitute sovereign of a nation of bankrupt assassins to spare ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... say; they awaited, while gratifying the eyes, a destination unknown to their owner himself; in the meantime they filled the place with their golden and silky reflections. In the centre of the room was a Roller and Blanchet "baby grand" piano in rosewood, but holding the potentialities of an orchestra in its narrow and sonorous cavity, and groaning beneath the weight of the chefs-d'oeuvre of Beethoven, Weber, Mozart, Haydn, Gretry, and Porpora. On the walls, over the doors, on the ceiling, were swords, daggers, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... told me that, being very fond of music when he was small, he stole down one morning at six to play the piano. His father, a very early riser, was disturbed by the gentle tinkling, and coming out of his study, asked him rather sharply why he couldn't do something useful—read some Shakespeare. He never played on the piano again for months, and for years never until ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... gigli e le vermiglie rose Del volto, e gli occhi bei conversa al piano, Gli occhi, onde in perle accolto il pianto uscia, La ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains which he himself could ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... fundamental incompatibility between one's affections and one's wider conception of duty and work comes in. We cannot change social institutions in a year or a lifetime. We can never change them to suit an individual case. That would be like suspending the laws of gravitation in order to move a piano. As things are, Martin is no good to me, no help to me. She is a rival to my duty. She feels that. She is hostile to my duty. A definite antagonism has developed. She feels and treats fuel—and everything to do with fuel as a bore. It is an attack. ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... lighting fixtures frequently are mere pendants, with the cord frankly in evidence. In this way the lights may be placed wherever needed—at the head of the lounge, so one may read more clearly by it; close by the piano; over the tea-table. In fact, supplementary lights to the general illumination are a convenience that ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... examination had come to an end. The questions on history had all been answered and duly marked by the patient professors who had come to Cherry Court Park for the great occasion. The girls one by one had approached the piano and played each her trial piece and had sung her trial song, and still it seemed to everyone that Kitty led the van; for her music, although not quite so showy and brilliant as Florence's, was marked with true musical expression, and her song, a sweet old English ballad, ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... establishment known as "Bert's Place," and was shocked on staring through his show window to observe the Honourable George and Cousin Egbert waltzing madly with the cow-persons, Hank and Buck, to the strains of a mechanical piano. The Honourable George had exchanged his top-hat for his partner's cow-person hat, which came down over his ears ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... friends were patiently awaiting her return. Nolan was reading poetry aloud to himself in the roof garden, and Lieutenant Ames was laboriously picking chords on the piano, with Marie near him strumming on ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... was. It was a dear little apartment that the girls shared, with a living-room chosen especially for having nice times in. It was lighted by tall candles, and had a gas grate that was almost human. There was a grand piano which took up more than its share of room, there was the davenport aforesaid, there were companionable chairs and taborets acquired by Lucille and kept by Marjorie in the exact places where they looked best; there were soft draperies, also hemmed and put up by Marjorie. The first thing visitors always ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... a name to the game, which was half a war-dance, half a cake-walk, accompanied by chanted couplets composed by each performer in turn; said couplets being necessarily original and relevant locally. The accompaniment—an easy change of chords—was played on the piano colla voce. And no one minded in the least a foot, more or less, at the end of a verse. The joke was the thing with the Madigans, and the impromptu rhyme that brought down the house was the ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... neatness and freshness, with its green silk curtains just shading the French window which was opened to the soft July air bearing the scent of the roses and jessamine; its low easy-chairs, of various patterns, its oval table with a cover of white and gold, its neat cabinet piano, the pretty dainty chimney ornaments, the few cool light sketches in water-colour that adorned the walls, the small book-case with a few charmingly bound volumes which filled up one recess by the fireplace, and ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... reach him, he had closed the door and was jingling his spurs along the passage to a spiral stairway of broad concrete steps. As he left the head of the stairway, a dance-time piano measure and burst of laughter made him peep into a white morning room, flooded with sunshine. A young girl, in rose-colored kimono and boudoir cap, was at the instrument, while two others, similarly accoutered, in each other's arms, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... flying and the buttered-bun dishes crashed against each other in the hearth. The other philosophers were crouched in odd shapes on the sofa and table and chairs, and one, who was a little bored, had crawled to the piano and was timidly trying the Prelude to Rhinegold with his knee upon the soft pedal. The air was heavy with good tobacco-smoke and the pleasant warmth of tea, and as Rickie became more sleepy the events of the day seemed to float one by one before his acquiescent ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... white copies of bold, clever pictures he had painted; there was martial music composed by him, and plaintive folk-songs adapted by him, which Virginia had tried softly to herself on her little piano, when nobody was near. There were reports of speeches made by him since his accession to the Throne; accounts of improvements in guns, and an invention of a new explosive; there was a somewhat crude, yet witty play which he had written; and numerous other records ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
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