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More "Whirr" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fields, sparkling on the heights and blue in the hollows. The brown bushes by a hidden stone-wall broke the sheen entrancingly; here and there a dry leaf fluttered, but only enough to show how still such winter stillness can be, and a flock of little brown birds rose, with a soft whirr, and settled further on. Mrs. Wadleigh pressed her lips together in a voiceless content, and her eyes took on a new brightness. She had lived quite long enough in the town. Rounding a sweeping bend, and ploughing sturdily along, though it was difficult here to find the roadway, she ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... was now in full swing. The grating British volleys, the ceaseless mill of independent firing, the sharp flash of the British guns, the fierce whirr of our French shells, the deep boom of Long Tom resounding through the valleys. Who ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... a big easy-chair, Randall McLean heard the crash of the horses' hoofs and the whirr-r-r of the wheels on the gravelly road in front, and demanded of the attendant ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... with a great whirr, and flew through the high window and the walls as they had come, and she said to the Vizier, 'What now? Fearest thou? I have spared thee, thou that madest me desolate! and thy slaves are a sacrifice for thee. Now this I ask: Where lies my beloved, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... villages in the heart of the Taunus Mountains that are little altered by this progressive age; no railway, not even the post-chaise reaches them, and motor-cars are only to be seen as they whirr past occasionally on the ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... with fatigue, and he had no courage left to approach the wall. There fell a mist over his eyes, and there came a soorawn in his head, and he was obliged to sit down upon a great stone to recover himself. He could see nothing but the light, and he could hear nothing but the whirr of it as it shot round the paddock faster than a flash ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... merits and deserts; I came down again and comforted the people, saying, "The Lord hath given us a sign, and He will feed us, as He fed the people of Israel in the wilderness; for He has sent us a fine flight of fieldfares across the barren sea, so that they whirr out of every bush as ye come near it. Who will now run down into the village, and cut off the mane and tail of my dead cow which lies out behind on the common?" (for there was no horsehair in all the village, seeing that the enemy had long since carried off or stabbed all the horses). But no one ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... floating whiles adown the river fair, Or whiles on bank of grassy green beguiling summer's flame. Therewith Ascanius, all afire with lust of noble fame, Turned on the beast the spiky reed from out the curved horn; Nor lacked the God to his right hand; on was the arrow borne With plenteous whirr, and smote the hart through belly and through flank; Who, wounded, to the well-known house fled fast, and groaning shrank Into the stalls of his abode, and bloody, e'en as one 501 Who cries for pity, filled the ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... chains, in combination with the concussion of the buffers as they hitch up suddenly again, sounds a regular obbligato accompaniment—the scream of the steam whistle, and the thundering whish and whirr of the train through a deep cutting or tunnel, or over a bridge with water below, coming in occasionally as a sort of symphony to the ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... your feet are one ache and your eyes drawn to dozing And you're sick of the sight and the smell of the shop! When a whiff from the meadows appears to come stealing Above all our washes, and powders, and soaps; And the whirr of the brush which revolves near the ceiling Seems pain to our ears and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 29, 1891 • Various
... them, ready to spring into the air. We cock our guns, agree to shoot respectively at the birds which go right or left or straight before us, and then advance to flush the covey ourselves. The staunch dog never winces as we pass her: two paces, three, a sudden rush and whirr as of many wings, five sharp reports in quick succession and four birds down! Another, wild with fright, rises straight up for twenty feet and darts off behind us, but his beautiful head droops as the crack of my last barrel resounds on the air and a cloud of feathers floats downward. The shot has ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... dress for the meal, and then to repair to the drawing-room as the appointed hour (two o'clock) drew near, and pass the time of waiting in lively conversation. Just as the clock in the servants' hall was beginning to whirr before striking the hour, Foka would enter with noiseless footsteps, and, throwing his napkin over his arm and assuming a dignified, rather severe expression, would say in loud, measured tones: "Luncheon is ready!" Thereupon, with pleased, cheerful faces, ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... her head gratefully. After all, then, she was not to die. It seemed to her hardly possible. But before she could rise a subdued whirr of machinery penetrated into the room, and the motor-car came slowly to ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... Dan whispered. It was one of the few history dates that he could remember. Kadmiel turned on him with a sweep and a whirr of ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... have ears on the stretch for the footfalls of sorrow that never come, but be deaf to the whirr of the wings of happiness that ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... reached the top of that long ridge, we found it broad as well as long, and we were moving rapidly across it when, with the usual whirr and crash and scream, one of the enemy's big shells fell in the midst of our right centre, killing two horses at a gun. It was at once followed by another, and a dozen or two more. They had our range exactly, and the art of knowing what was going on behind the hill, ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... clamored along the river. Some crows followed the workers at a distance, hunting for grains of corn, and over in the woods, a chewink scratched and rustled among the deep leaves as it searched for grubs. From time to time a flock of quail arose before them with a whirr and scattered down the fields, reassembling later at the call of their leader, from a rider of the snake fence, ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... hay, and the scent of it lay like a spell upon the senses. The whirr of the mowing machine filled the air with a lazy droning. It was like a lullaby. And ever they sped on, through towns and villages and hamlets, through woods and lanes and open country, sure and swift and noiseless save for the cheery ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... like my Angora tabby: stroke them smoothly and they will purr and rub noses with you; but stroke them the wrong way and whirr! they scratch your hands and out of the window they fly! When ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... The whirr of an approaching motor caused them both to look up. A grizzled man of fifty got out and, after a decisive order to the chauffeur, turned to join them. His movements were quick and nervous, and his eyes restless under their ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... With a whirr like the wings of a partridge as it is flushed out of the grass by the huntsman's dog, the small machine shot forward a few feet over the smooth ground, then gracefully arose in the air and started away ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... A faint whirr as of wings was drowned in the automatic grunt of acceptance squeezed from all the warriors and the wizards by the sacred chant, except those of the inner circle. In dread sat the warriors of the terrible magic ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... conversation languished, and they sat on the rough shaley earth, trying to pierce the gloom, and listening with quite a start from time to time to the sharp whirr of the pigeons' wings as ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... never noticed them before. A sunbeam came through the shutterless window of the house and writhed and quivered on the wall as if it were a live thing. She read a warning in this, and in the color of the sun, that was red, like blood, and in the whirr of the grasshoppers, that was sinister and threatening. The creeks had dried, and their slimy beds crept along the willows like sluggish snakes. Gaunt range-cattle bellowed in their thirst, and the parched earth crackled beneath the sun ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... trees stood clearly defined against the bright sky, and in the damper and more sheltered spots fire-flies were darting about and filling the air with their brilliant flashes, while the shrill cries of frogs and night-birds and whirr of beetles resounded on every side. We were riding on, listening to these varied sounds of animated nature, when we saw some dark objects, which appeared like human beings, lying on ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... down through the park to the farm. It was a splendid August evening. The reaping was still in progress, and the whirr of the machine rose slumbrous through the stillness. But of the Vicarage children there was at ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... dewy, brilliant gossamer-webs; when the hedges are full of trailing brambles, loaded with ripe blackberries; when the air is full of the farewell whistles and pipes of birds, clear and short—not the long full- throated warbles of spring; when the whirr of the partridge's wings is heard in the stubble-fields, as the sharp hoof-blows fall on the paved lanes; when here and there a leaf floats and flutters down to the ground, although there is not a single breath of wind. The country surgeon felt the beauty of the seasons ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... show stretches of trellis, along which meander the cord-like tendrils of bignonias, aristolochias, and orchids, the flowers of which, drooping over windows and doorways, shut out the too garish sunlight, while filling the air with fragrance. Among these whirr tiny humming birds, buzz humble bees almost as big, while butterflies bigger than either lazily flout and flap about on ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... and leftward, where the sky was blue, Thundered aloud. At once the fateful bow Twanged; with a whirr the fateful arrow flew, And pierced the head of Remulus. "Now go, And teach thy proud tongue to insult a foe, And scoff at Trojan valour. This reply Twice-captured Phrygians to thy taunts bestow." Ascanius spoke; ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... articles, from matches to steam-engines. The rivers which flow down to the sea from the western chain of mountains carry millions of logs from the great dark forests. As soon as the ice breaks up in the spring, whole fleets of fishing boats and lumber vessels sail up and down the coast; sawmills whirr and buzz all day long; the hum of labor is heard all over ...
— Gerda in Sweden • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... sisters. When I first saw Ruth there in the midst of the confusion of unpacking, the room in Irving Place with its old chests and samovars, Esther Claff quietly writing in her corner, the telephone bell muffled to an undisturbing whirr, flashed before me. ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... the street for a few blocks ere he heard the whirr of a Gridley-bound trolley car behind him. He quickened his pace until he reached the next corner. There he signaled ...
— The High School Boys' Training Hike • H. Irving Hancock
... she go back in all humbleness to the man she loved? Did he want her, having shown no sign or desire for her return? Did he—did he not? A decision must be made, and soon, but what was it to be? Round and round, like a flock of startled pigeons, went her thoughts, one breaking away to whirr into the back of her mind, another to drift into the shadows, and another, and yet another, whilst the rest flew ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... On, on. Lead. Lead. Hail. Spatter. Whirr! Whirr! 'Toward that patch of brown; Direction left'. Bullets a stream. Devouring thought crying in a dream. Men, crumpled, going down.... Go on. Go. Deafness. Numbness. The loudening tornado. Bullets. Mud. Stumbling and skating. My voice's strangled ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... was a loud whirr of wheels, a buzz of internal mechanism, and all the little figures would stop dead with arms outstretched, whilst the beheaded doll rolled off the board and was lost to view, no doubt preparatory to going through the ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... girl had to do was to go to the storehouse, and to sift the corn through a sieve. While she was busy rubbing the corn she heard a whirr of wings, and a flock of sparrows flew in ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... took it, placed himself in front of the wheel, and whirr, whirr, whirr, three times round, and the bobbin was full. Then he set up another, and whir, whir, whir, thrice round again, and a second bobbin was full; and so he went all night long, until all the straw was spun, ...
— Grimm's Fairy Stories • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... thousand and two thousand-foot lanes. The lights of Tappen were dwindling beneath us. The interior of the Cometara was humming with the whirr of its circulators and air-receivers, mingled with the throb of air pressure pumps. At three thousand feet I started the air-rocket engines. They came on with a gentle purring. The fluorescence from them streamed along our hull and down past the stern, ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... inaccessible place he could find. The Bergson wagon lurched along over the rough hummocks and grass banks, followed the bottom of winding draws, or skirted the margin of wide lagoons, where the golden coreopsis grew up out of the clear water and the wild ducks rose with a whirr of wings. ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... Do not think that nothing is happening because you do not see yourself grow, or hear the whirr of the machinery. All great things grow noiselessly. You can see a mushroom grow, but never a child. Mr. Darwin tells us that Evolution proceeds by "numerous, successive, and slight modifications." The ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... had not caught her in five minutes' racing. It was really shameful. But the partridge seemed to gain strength as the fox put forth his, and after a quarter of a mile race, racing that was somehow all away from Taylor's Hill, the bird got unaccountably quite well, and, rising with a derisive whirr, flew off through the woods leaving the fox utterly dumfounded to realize that he had been made a fool of, and, worst of all, he now remembered that this was not the first time he had been served this very trick, though he never knew the reason ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... special revelation, we find in the existing state of England much that appears to us to need control. We are unable to share the optimism which animates Remenham and his friends as to the direction and effects of the new forces of industry. Above the whirr of the spindle and the shaft we hear the cry of the poor. Behind our flourishing warehouses and shops we see the hovels of the artisan. We watch along our highroads the long procession of labourers deserting their ancestral villages for the cities; we trace them to ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... breezes birr, New budded boughs among, I saw the deeper tinting stir In the green tassels of the fir, I heard the pheasant rise and whirr, Above her callow young. ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... answering could be picked out without great difficulty. Added to this the air was still; the dull thud of the field guns at work there was different from the resounding boom of the naval guns, and the whirr of the machine ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... A brace of partridges had sprung up at some little distance, and with a wild whirr of their wings were now directing their low and rapid flight toward ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... Chicksands. The astonishing warmth and sunshine of the month had brought out a shimmer of spring everywhere, reddened the great heads of the oaks, and set the sycamore buds shining like jewels in the pale blue. There was an endless chatter and whirr of wood-pigeons in the high tree-tops, and underfoot the anemones and violets were busy pushing their gentle way through the dead leaves of autumn. The Squire's beechwoods were famous in the neighbourhood, and he was still proud of them; though for many years past they had gone ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... behind, pulled up beside the other horse and threw himself off. Even as he touched the ground a sharp whirr met his ear and he saw the fat, still body and vibrating tail of the snake. He wrenched the pistol from the holster, took the quickest aim of his life and pulled the trigger. After the shot apparently nothing had changed. The whirr of the rattle went on for a second or two, ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... Whirr! a kingfisher darts down with a quick splash, and back to his bough with a fish in his beak. The canoe moves on, slowly, noiselessly; here the water is only three inches deep, but the soft bottom yields as the strong young arms ply ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... contiguity of shade. Solitude sometimes, you know, is best society, and short retirement urges sweet return. Various travels or voyages of discovery may be undertaken, and their grand object attained in little more than an hour. The sudden whirr of a cushat is an incident, or the leaping of a lamb among the broom. In the quiet of nature, matchless seems the music of the milkmaid's song—and of the hearty laugh of the haymakers, crossing the meadow in rows, how sweet the cheerful echo from Helm-crag! ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... already in such a state of diseased susceptibility that the most innocent words from Captain Wybrow would have been irritating to her, as the whirr of the most delicate wing will afflict a nervous patient. But this tone of benevolent remonstrance was intolerable. He had inflicted a great and unrepented injury on her, and now he assumed an air of benevolence towards her. This was a new outrage. His profession ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... "There! Dad!—There!" I saw two gobblers wade into the brook not more than a hundred and fifty feet away. Drawing down with fine aim I fired. The bullet splashed water all over the turkeys. One with loud whirr of wings flew away. The other leaped across the brook and ran—swift as a deer—right up the slope. As I tried to get the sight on him I heard other turkeys fly, and the crack-crack of R.C.'s gun. I shot ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... to lift his hands, but was unable to do so, so he lifted his voice instead! Yerkes, in the whirr of the machine, doubtless mistook the voice for that of the boy, for he paid no attention ...
— Boy Scouts in an Airship • G. Harvey Ralphson
... Emperor lay in his bed listening to the bird which was singing its very best. Suddenly it stopped with a jerk, and bang! something had snapped in its inside, and all its wheels ran down with a whirr, and then there was ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... As a rule they are terrestrial, but may take to trees when flushed. They are game birds par excellence, and, says Chapman, trusting to the concealment afforded by their dull colors, attempt to avoid detection by hiding rather than by flying. The flight is rapid and accompanied by a startling whirr, caused by the quick strokes of their small, concave, stiff-feathered wings. They roost on the ground, tail to tail, with heads pointing outward; "a bunch of closely huddled forms—a living bomb whose explosion is scarcely less startling ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... and ballad had swung from that tall gallows which caught the eye before Ecija's eight church towers. There had been famous fighting, too, by the river bank; but now the place slept, dreaming of peace, and the whirr of the mill-wheels sounded as comforting as the "chum-chum" of a motor ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... branches, and all along its ditch border the starry stitchwort lifted its childish faces, and chorused in lines and masses. Never had I seen such a symphony of note-like flowers and tendrils and leaves. And suddenly in its depths, I heard a chirrup and the whirr ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... soft notes As happy bridegrooms utter, when their throats Are paralyzed with blest anticipation;— (What Gawayne looked for was decapitation!) And then the Green Knight swung his axe in air With a loud whirr; and Gawayne, kneeling there, Shrank back an inch; and the green giant stayed His threatening hand, and with a cold sneer said: "You shrink, sir, from the axe; I can't hit true Unless you hold still, as I did for you." "Your pardon," ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... when the short half hour was over and the wheels began to whirr again. Though wearied, she would be inconspicuous. This illusion ended when another young man passed along the aisle and poked her indifferently in the ribs with his thumb. She turned about, indignation leaping to her eyes, but he had gone ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... the shotguns went in advance, and soon reached a point where they could look beyond the bushes. Then came a sudden whirr, and up into the air went a small flock ...
— The Rover Boys on Snowshoe Island - or, The Old Lumberman's Treasure Box • Edward Stratemeyer
... their health-giving and invisible currents, turning sails upon countless hill-tops, and wheels in every river—before the supplanter, steam, was even dreamed of. His earliest recollections were mingled with the busy clatter of wheels, and the whirr of sails, as they sped round before the wind, was the music of his boyhood. His father, good man of the world as he was, holding a high opinion of the solid comforts gained by following his own profitable calling, placed his son, at the age ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... and got our Naval guns in position to attack, but found that the Boers had evacuated the ground in front of us. Up and on at a great rate over the grassy veldt, the guns now marching in four columns and keeping a broad front. At about 1 p.m. sudden firing in front and the familiar whirr of Boer shells made us come into action at 4,500 yards on Almond's Nek Pass, through which our road lay. The Boers were evidently in possession, judging by the warm greeting of Pom-poms and the Creusot 5", which played on us without much damage. The troops were now all halted, and ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... evening glow. Farewell, my lord Sun! The creeks overflow: a thousand rivulets run 'Twixt the roots of the sod; the blades of the marsh-grass stir; Passeth a hurrying sound of wings that westward whirr; Passeth, and all is still; and the currents cease to run; And the sea ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... same poplars by the river. Those poplars I am thinking of are alongside a stately old French mill, built, towered, and gabled, of fine grey stone; and the image of them brings up in my mind, with the draught and foam of the weir and the glassiness of the backwater, and the whirr of the horse-ferry's ropes, that some of the most delightful moments which one's bicycle can give, are those when the bicycle is resting against a boat's side (once also in Exmouth harbour); or chained to an old lych-gate; or, as I remarked about my Campagna ride, taking its rest also ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... childish days I heard A woman's voice that slowly read, How 'twixt two shadowy mountains sped Four colored steeds, four chariots whirr'd. ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... There was a strange whirr and a clicking in the apartment beyond, as if some machinery was in motion. But then came a loud voice and the other sounds stopped. By getting down on his hands and knees Adam Adams was enabled to hear nearly all that was said in the place ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... ten paces away, and held a mass meeting to protest; whereupon the father of all the dragon-flies, a magnificent warrior in a steel- blue armour, saw that a conspiracy was afoot, and swept into the midst with a whirr and a snap, a turn here and a flash there, that scattered the host in a twinkling of ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... louder than the vibrations of the hamlet bell, louder than the bird-notes and the tumult of the voluptuous insect whirr, there rang the thud, thud of cruel blows falling on ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... along. No word was spoken; each was wrapped in thought. Now and again a stray prairie chicken would fly up from their path with a whirr, and speed across the mire, calling to its mate as it went. The drowsy chirrup of frogs went on unceasingly around, and already the ubiquitous mosquito was on the ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... to remain quiet in the breast of his jacket. Then he sat again on the table and looked fixedly at the door of the room he had just left. He listened also intently. He heard a dry sound of rustling; sharp cracks as of dry wood snapping; a whirr like of a bird's wings when it rises suddenly, and then he saw a thin stream of smoke come through the keyhole. The monkey struggled under his coat. Ali appeared with his eyes starting out of ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... noise like the whirr of enormous wings, and then, looking up, saw a huge dragon just in front of him. He knew it was a dragon from the pictures he had seen and ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... he might meet the hoarse-throated newsboys running along with their papers, announcing the special edition which would give the terms of the edict to the public. Every sound or movement that detached itself with isolated significance from the general whirr and scurry of the streets seemed to Yeovil to herald the oncoming clamour and rush that he was looking for. But the long endless succession of motors and 'buses and vans went by, hooting and grunting, and such ...
— When William Came • Saki
... the story was done, the dragon-fly flew off with a whirr, and darted to and fro, hunting for its breakfast, glittering splendidly as it flashed among the leaves or darted close above the water. Daisy forgot her disappointment in a minute, and went fishing for lilies; while the turtles ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... caught her in five minutes' racing. It was really shameful. But the partridge seemed to gain strength as the fox put forth his, and after a quarter of a mile race, racing that was somehow all away from Taylor's Hill, the bird got unaccountably quite well, and, rising with a decisive whirr, flew off through the woods, leaving the fox utterly dumfounded to realize that he had been made a fool of, and, worst of all, he now remembered that this was not the first time he had been served this very trick, though he never knew the reason ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... to earth—at least proclaim At vacant holes the overtaken game) That men who marked you nourishing the tongue, And saw your arms so vigorously swung, All marveled how so light a breeze could stir So great a windmill to so great a whirr! Little they knew, or surely they had grinned, The mill was ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... the air abounds, The whirr of birds is dying out, The swart mechanic's lusty shout Amid ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... that whirring, singing sound? Was that a new signal that Barney was trying? Was it—Whirr, s-st! Down like a shot dropped Tam's head, and like an arrow he leaped forward, swerving sideways to escape the danger he had scented,—the danger of a lariat flung by ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... chests would allow, and there we crouched, listening; but could not tell what manner of thing it might be which produced so strange a noise. For it was neither shuffling, nor treading of any kind, nor yet was it the whirr of a bat's wings, the which had first occurred to me, knowing how vampires are said to inhabit the nights in dismal places. Nor yet was it the slurr of a snake; but rather it seemed to us to be as though a great wet cloth were being rubbed everywhere ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... second's silence, then a faint moaning, a crescendo wail, the whirr and rush of a snarling, shrieking skyrocket overhead, and a crash, like all the thunders of the universe rolled into one, when the shell struck, followed by the roar of falling brick as a neighboring house came pouring ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... the rector, and the two went off together. And sure enough, after a little beating about, they heard the note which had roused the lad's curiosity, the loud whirr of a creature that should have been a grasshopper, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mammals, but the birds along the road were fascinating. Brilliant green parrots screamed in the tree tops and tiny sun-birds dressed in garments of red and gold and purple, flashed across the trail like living jewels. Once we heard a strange whirr and saw a huge hornbill flapping heavily over the river, every beat of his stiff wing feathers sounding like the motor of an aeroplane. Bamboo partridges called from the bushes and dozens of unfamiliar bird ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... cleared, and a fair half-moon of silvery brightness shone out above the tops of the white gum forest. Fifty yards or so away, in front of the door, a shallow pool had formed in a depression of the hard, sun-baked soil, and as the soft light of the moon fell upon it there came a whirr of wings as a flock of night-roving, spur-winged plover lit upon its margin. I could have shot half a dozen of them from where I sat, but felt that I could not lift gun to shoulder and slaughter when there was no ...
— "Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging In The Pacific - 1901 • Louis Becke
... steps to the house, she heard the whirr of a motor in the street. It stopped in front of the house, and as Margaret waited she heard Mrs. Hillyer's thin voice: "I am so sorry! Please tell Mrs. Pole that I came over from Lancaster to get her for dinner." Presently the motor whirled ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... to go when we heard a whirr overhead, followed by a volley of mitrailleuse. High up in the blue, over the centre of the dead city, flew a German aeroplane; and all about it hundreds of white shrapnel tufts burst out in the summer sky like ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... protracted sounds.] Roll — N. roll &c v.; drumming &c v.; berloque^, bombination^, rumbling; tattoo, drumroll; dingdong; tantara^; rataplan^; whirr; ratatat, ratatat-tat; rubadub; pitapat; quaver, clutter, charivari^, racket; cuckoo; repetition &c 104; peal of bells, devil's tattoo; reverberation &c 408. [sound of railroad train rolling on rails] clickety-clack. hum, purr. [animals that hum] hummingbird. [animals that purr] cat, kitten (animal ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... listening on Roy's part to show that the man had spoken the truth about the noises near the tenement. There sounded the whirr of dynamos, the puffing of steam, the rattle of coal and ashes down chutes—in short it would have taken a loud voice to make itself heard above the racket. A better place to keep a prisoner, in the midst of a great city, ...
— The Boy from the Ranch - Or Roy Bradner's City Experiences • Frank V. Webster
... and doors were wide open letting in a wealth of sunshine, it appeared startlingly lifeless and void. The maids seemed unusually quiet. She heard no movement on the staircase or in the rooms above. Neither gardener nor garden-boy was visible. She would have hailed the whirr of the mowing machine or swish of a broom on the lawn.—Oh! if only her poor dear Nannie were still alive, safe upstairs, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... his car out among the tall weeds close to the line of scrub willows edging the creek; extinguished his lights, including the tail-lamp; left his engine running; stood listening a moment to the whispering whirr of his motor; then, taking the flash light from his pocket, he climbed over the roadside wall and ran back across the pasture ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... front of them rose a hill with a darkness of trees scattered over it. They reached it, and began to mount it slowly. The lights of the city shone below them. Domini saw great sloping lawns dotted with streets and by trees. Scents of hidden flowers came to her in the night, and she heard a whirr of insects. Still they mounted, and presently reached the top of ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... goes on like the whirr of the wheels of a great clock that can never run down—a melancholy complaint against the hardships of destiny—a raucous protest ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... moth upon the window-panes Hath ceased to flap, or traverse with blind whirr The room's dusk corners; and the leaves without Vibrate upon their thin stems with the breeze Flying towards the light. To an Eastern vale That light may now be waning, and across The tall reeds by the Ganges, lotus-paved, Lengthening ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... out to make him a breakfast. Hark! do you not hear the drum of that partridge? He is up there in that thicket of young beeches and hemlocks, on the other side of the road. As you hear the slow, measured drum which he gives at first, and which he hastens into a whirr like distant thunder, does not 'The old Man's Counsel' come fresh to your memory, and almost ringing in your ear? Ah! this is the glory of true poetry, that it clothes the commonest things with a new interest, and forever after they become objects ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... for, though no breath fanned your cheek, your senses easily detected the delicious odor of a distant garden of sweet roses. The sea sparkled with phosphorescence. Not a sound was heard except the panting of the hard-worked little donkey-engine and the whirr of the line as it came up taut and dripping from the ocean depths. The lamp, hanging from the mast, threw a bright glare on deck, presenting the strongest contrast with the black shadows, firm and motionless as marble. The 11th day of December ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... Trojans fell the Greeks; in rout Disastrous they, unmann'd by terror, fled. Great Ajax still, unwearied, long'd to hurl His spear at Hector of the brazen helm; But he, well skill'd in war, his shoulders broad Protected by his shield of tough bull's hide, Watch'd for the whizzing shafts, and jav'lins' whirr. Full well he knew the tide of battle turn'd, Yet held his ground, his trusty friends ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... valley, they hunted the hill, The best of our lads wi' the best o' their skill; But still as the fairest she sat in their sight, Then, whirr! she was over, a mile at a flight. I ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... interest in hundreds of things I should have passed over. For instance, that morning, as we strolled a little way along the lane, we stopped to peer over the gate into a newly ploughed field at some round-looking birds which rose directly with a loud whirr, and then went skimming along, to glide over the hedge at ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... sang gaily. Robins called; bluejays screeched in the tall, white oaks; wood-peckers hammered in the dead hard-woods, and crows cawed overhead. Squirrels chattered everywhere. Ruffed grouse rose with great bustle and a whirr, flitting like brown flakes through the leaves. From far above came the shrill cry of a hawk, followed by the ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... and graceful. As I move forward, new landscapes open up continuously: views park-like and picturesque. Gangs of buffalo, herds of antelope, and droves of wild horses, mottle the far vistas. Turkeys run into the coppice, and pheasants whirr ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... Baroness, handling the brittle wires with her delicate little fingers, gave me the numbers as I wanted them, and carefully held the coil whilst I unrolled it. Suddenly one of them coiled itself up again with a whirr, making the Baroness utter an impatient "Oh!" Lady Adelheid enjoyed a hearty laugh, whilst I pursued the tangled coil to the corner of the room. After we had all united our efforts to extract a perfectly straight string from it, and had ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... protracted sounds.] Roll. — N. roll &c. v.; drumming &c. v.; berloque[obs3], bombination[obs3], rumbling; tattoo, drumroll; dingdong; tantara[obs3]; rataplan[obs3]; whirr; ratatat, ratatat- tat; rubadub; pitapat; quaver, clutter, charivari[obs3], racket; cuckoo; repetition &c. 104; peal of bells, devil's tattoo; reverberation &c. 408. [sound of railroad train rolling on rails] clickety-clack. hum, purr. [animals that hum] hummingbird. [animals ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... around us was admirably green. The strong sea-breeze had suddenly fallen, and was succeeded by a perfect calm; the atmosphere, now very warm, was laden with the perfume of flowers. In the valley resounded the ceaseless whirr of the cicalas, answering each other from one shore to another; the mountains reechoed with innumerable sounds; the whole country seemed to vibrate like crystal. On our way we passed among myriads of Japanese ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... a while; and then the light began to change, the east came orange, the whole wood began to whirr with singing like a musical box, and there was ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that have neither beginning nor end, puszta adventures, the atrocities of vagabonds and their fellows, the sad love stories of poor deserted maidens and such like. And all the while the wheels of the spindle whirr-whirr-whirred monotonously, and Henrietta felt like a little child whose nurse sits beside her bed and lulls her to sleep with fairy tales. For weeks she had not enjoyed so quiet and dreamless a slumber as she had that night beneath ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... up atween the bed an' the wa'; an' at ilky hooch an whirr 'at the wind gae he wheenged an' groaned like's he was terriple ill wi' his inside; an' aye he was sayin', "I've been a lazy gaen-aboot vegabon', an' ill-hertit vague. O ...
— My Man Sandy • J. B. Salmond
... her on his big iron-gray horse. No more good times with the best and jolliest of little neighbours. A summer without Rob's cheery whistle and good-natured laugh would seem as empty and queer as the woods without the bird voices, or the meadows without the whirr of humming ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... questioning, Von Barwig found the family he was looking for on the fourth floor of a crowded tenement house in Rivington Street. He heard the whirr of sewing machines and as he opened the door he saw the father of his pupil, and several others, all sewing rapidly as if for dear life. The six machines made such a noise he could barely hear the sound of his own voice. As soon as Branski saw Von Barwig, he jumped ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... walls were intact, many of its staircases were rotten, while its flooring was, as I knew, heavily broken away in spots, making it a dangerous task to walk about its passage-ways, or even to enter the large and solitary rooms which once shook to the whirr ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... artist, "I am often at a loss to know whether I love or despise you most. If a little of the whirr of our great grandam's spinning wheel would only get into your brain the world might hear from you. You are a man of unbounded stomach and unbounded heart, and so you have won all there is of me except my head, and that ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... was made clear, for the line of Indians advanced obliquely towards the long grass till the leading man came almost in touch a couple of hundred yards in advance, when all at once there was the wild whirr of wings, and about a couple of dozen great birds sprang into ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... Karen refused to come with her? It would not do, Madame von Marwitz saw that clearly, for an alienated Karen to be taken to the Lippheims'. Comparisons and disclosures would ensue that would send the loom, with a mighty whirr, weaving rapidly in an opposite direction to that of the plan. Franz, in Germany, must be pacified, and Karen be carried off to some lovely, lonely spot until the husband's suit was safely won. It was not fatal to the plan that Karen should be supposed, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... thing to contemplate that you have rung a bell for the last time. One can get very sentimental over a thing like that. Dear jolly old bells, what an influence they have upon life. How bravely they whirr at the arrival of a dear expected—how madly they riot to the tune Wedding—how sadly they toll when the last of us is ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... careless, youth is fleet, With heart and wing of bird! The lark flew up beneath our feet, To his copse the pheasant whirr'd; ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... longer slow sailing as before, but with the swift-cutting flight of a falcon pouncing down upon its prey. It seemed descending not in a straight line, but in an acute parabolic curve, like a thunderbolt or some aerolite projected toward the surface of the sea. But the bird, with a whirr like the sound of running spindles, was going in a definite direction, the point evidently aimed at being ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... from a distant apartment there came a peculiar click and rumble, followed by a whirr of wheels, as if someone was running out a small motor close by. At the same time, the two friends noticed the unmistakable odor of ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... not the contralto note Of cuckoos hid on either hand, The whirr that shakes the nighthawk's throat When eve's brown awning hoods ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... of hoofs and a whirr of wheels, the fire engine dashed around the corner. The driver was crouched low in the seat. ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... There, under the lea of the hill, it was necessary to get "a breather," and to gather themselves together for the supreme effort. The scene was not exhilarating. The grey mist falling—the scattered earth and mud rising and spluttering, the shrieking shells rending the air, already vibrant with the whirr of bullets—the closer sounds and sights of death and destruction—all these things were sufficient to stem the courage of stoutest hearts. Still the British band remained undaunted, still they prepared boldly for the final rush. Presently, with renewed energy the three gallant regiments, steadily ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... bring out the solitude, warmth, light and shade—the quawk of some pond duck—(the crickets and grasshoppers are mute in the noon heat, but I hear the song of the first cicadas;)—then at some distance the rattle and whirr of a reaping machine as the horses draw it on a rapid walk through a rye field on the opposite side of the creek—(what was the yellow or light-brown bird, large as a young hen, with short neck and long-stretch'd legs I just saw, in flapping and awkward flight over ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... in such a case! There's nothing feels so like disgrace, Or gives you such a scurvy look— A kick and pail of slush from Cook, Clefsticks, or Kettle, all in one, As standing to a missing gun! It's whirr! and bang! and off you bound, To catch your bird before the ground: But no—a pump and ginger pop As soon would get a bird to drop! So there you stand, quite struck a-heap, Till all your tail is gone to sleep; A sort of stiffness ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the direction of the cottage under the cherry-tree. The gentle whirr of the loom stole through the ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... switched on all the lights. I have them arranged so for just that purpose of scaring off intruders. Then, as I looked out of my window on the second floor, I fancied I could see a dark figure slink into the shadow of the shrubbery at the side of the house. Then there was a whirr. It might have been an automobile, although it sounded differently from that—more like a motor boat. At any rate, there was no trace of a car that we could discover in the morning. The road had been oiled, too, and a car would ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... the shadow of the sail, and the man at the rudder had let his pipe go out. As the gondola came alongside the boat, a small yellow dog sprang up and barked sharply at them, his body, from tip to tail, violently agitated with the whirr of the internal machinery. The helmsman, thus roused, pulled out a match and lighted his pipe; the sunshine was so bright that the light of the match was obliterated. Mrs. Daymond and Pauline watched the little drama ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... by the rail, at the gangplank, waiting for the hurried stream of passengers to disembark. Down on the wharf under the glaring white lights, swarmed a crowd from which rose a babel of voices. A whistle blew sharply at intervals. The whirr and honk of taxicabs, and the jangle of trolley cars, sounded beyond the wide dark portal of the dock-house. The murky water below splashed between ship and pier. Deep voices rang out, and merry laughs, and shrill glad cries of welcome. The bright light shone down upon a motley, ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... moleskin, and a little red motor-bonnet, surrounded by five men, one of them the somewhat notorious Maharajah of Indorwana. Vanno retreated hastily, and went on toward the steps which led up to the Rock of Monaco; but he had not gone far when a combination of sounds stopped him: the whirr of a propeller and the throb of an engine. Carleton was evidently on the point of trying his machine, the curious invention which could be used, it was said, on land as well as in air ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... a sudden darkening of the sky above their heads, a whirr of many wings, a chattering and laughing of soft voices, and the Swallows had come. Perched on the ridge-pole of the big barn, they rested and visited ...
— Among the Farmyard People • Clara Dillingham Pierson
... classed as expressive by association and by direct induction. Expressive by association are passages of direct imitation: the tolling of bells, the clash of arms, the roar of wind, the hum of spinning wheels, even to the bleating of sheep and the whirr of windmills; the cadence of the voice in pleading, laughter, love; from such imitations we are REMINDED of a fact or an emotion. More intimate is the expression by induction; emotion is aroused by activities which ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... them; and, most wonderful of all the wonderful things that had happened to her, the trees, the country, the distant city, all were gone! There was a charming log-fire on the hearth, sparkling and crackling; whirr, whirr, whirr, went the old woman's wheel, and there she sate in her chair just as usual; and the wind was blowing, and the rain was pelting against the shutters, exactly as it did the very night puss had left the cottage in such ...
— Tales From Catland, for Little Kittens • Tabitha Grimalkin
... aghast; but he thought of the cricket's gift at last, and taking it out of his pocket thrust it into the fire, and a cloud as dust showed in the sky and the distant whirr of thousands of wings caused the air to stir, as, dark'ning the day like a fun'ral pall, a flight of crickets appeared at the call. 'What is our task?' asked his friend with a laugh; 'only that? I've brought too many by half!' So they set to work with a will ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... and the lonely two lived a quiet life in the brown house. Everything was so still and fair—no sound but the coming and going tide, and the swaying wind among the pine-trees, and the tick of the clock, and the whirr of the little wheel as Mrs. Pennel sat spinning in her door in the mild weather. Mara read the Roman history through again, and began it a third time, and read over and over again the stories and prophecies that pleased her in the Bible, and pondered the wood-cuts and texts in a ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... time Holroyd maltreated him, Azuma-zi went presently to the Lord of the Dynamos and whispered, "Thou seest, O my Lord!" and the angry whirr of the machinery seemed to answer him. Thereafter it appeared to him that whenever Holroyd came into the shed a different note came into the sounds of the dynamo. "My Lord bides his time," said Azuma-zi to himself. "The iniquity ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... the Burmese boy, I had to claw down some high pigeons from untold heights on their way home to roost. After this, as I was loading, a partridge got up from some stubbly grass in a clearing, with an astonishingly familiar whirr, and went clear away, and I'd barely loaded when a Button quail whipped over some bushes, and it dropped, but in impenetrable thorns! I'd not heard of Burmese partridges, but the flight and whirr were unmistakeable, though the bird was larger than ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... The faint whirr of a buzzer and the patter of a maid's feet along the hall, checked Carr's speech. He did not resume. Instead he reached for a box of cigars, and lighted one. By that time Tommy ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... smell of Miller Loveday's pipe came down Mrs. Garland's chimney of an evening with the greatest regularity. Every time that he poked his fire they knew from the vehemence or deliberateness of the blows the precise state of his mind; and when he wound his clock on Sunday nights the whirr of that monitor reminded the widow to wind hers. This transit of noises was most perfect where Loveday's lobby adjoined Mrs. Garland's pantry; and Anne, who was occupied for some time in the latter apartment, enjoyed the privilege of hearing the visitors arrive and of catching stray sounds ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... air, and went beating up above the Surrey wastes. He felt a breath of wind from the southwest, and lifted his westward wing as he had learnt to do, and so drove upward heeling into the rare swift upper air. Whirr, whirr, whirr. ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... lightly with her silver wand, bade her close her eyes—another moment, and she bade her open them; and, most wonderful of all the wonderful things that had happened to her, the trees, the country, the distant city, all were gone! There was a charming log-fire on the hearth, sparkling and crackling; whirr, whirr, whirr, went the old woman's wheel, and there she sate in her chair just as usual; and the wind was blowing, and the rain was pelting against the shutters, exactly as it did the very night puss had left the cottage in such a mysterious way. In fact, ...
— Tales From Catland, for Little Kittens • Tabitha Grimalkin
... earth swelled to a kind of soft thunder: his quickened ears heard a thousand small outcries contributing to the awful energy of the world—faint chimings and whistlings in the grass, and endless flutter, rustle, and whirr. His own body, on which hair and nails grew daily like vegetation, startled and appalled him. Consciousness of self, that miserable ecstasy, ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... astonishing warmth and sunshine of the month had brought out a shimmer of spring everywhere, reddened the great heads of the oaks, and set the sycamore buds shining like jewels in the pale blue. There was an endless chatter and whirr of wood-pigeons in the high tree-tops, and underfoot the anemones and violets were busy pushing their gentle way through the dead leaves of autumn. The Squire's beechwoods were famous in the neighbourhood, and he was still proud of them; though for many years past ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... devil is there—an evil wind moaneth around— There is doom, there is death in the air: a curse groweth up from the ground! No noise of the axe or the saw in that hollow unholy is heard, No fall of the hoof or the paw, no whirr of the wing of the bird; But a grey mother down by the sea, as wan as the foam on the strait, Has counted the beads on her knee these forty-nine winters ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... on the edge of the village. We stopped the car, and I got out and went ahead, they remaining with leveled rifles, in their usual hospitable manner. When I got to within twenty feet of them we heard the whirr of a machine gun—which the Belgian soldiers call a cinema—and a German armoured car poked its nose around the corner for a look-see. It was firing high to draw a return fire and locate any Belgians there might be in the town, but they all scurried behind cover, closely followed by me. They ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... clustering red berries, seemed alive with the stir of little birds that filled with the feverish flutter of their feathers the tangle of overloaded branches. Suddenly the variegated flock rose spinning in a soft whirr and dispersed, slashing the sunlit haze with the sharp outlines of stiffened wings. Mahmat and one of his brothers appeared coming up from the landing-place, their lances in their hands, to look ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... was flashed up into the tree and around from branch to branch. As the rays traveled through the cedar there was a sudden wild cry from the animal, and then came a swish and a whirr as the wildcat sprang to the outer end of a limb and then down into ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)
... rounded, With a bill like two great paddles, Made him larger than the others, Ten times larger than the largest, Just as, shouting from the forest, 210 On the shore stood Hiawatha. Up they rose with cry and clamor, With a whirr and beat of pinions, Rose up from the reedy islands, From the water-flags and lilies. 215 And they said to Pau-Puk-Keewis: "In your flying, look not downward, Take good heed, and look not downward, Lest some strange mischance should happen, Lest some great mishap befall you!" ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... whistles. The change in the sound due to the whirling motion of the whistle might be called a swivelling whistle. See them go, led through the shadow. Hear them, as they disappear behind a rocky point ahead. What is meant by their "whirr"? What has made us forget all about the beauty of the silent morning? What effect did this silence probably have on the poet's judgment of the noise made by the ducks? Now what is ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... themselves up as if in angry surprise. Then for the first time thrilled in Mr. Bernard's ears the dreadful sound that nothing which breathes, be it man or brute, can hear unmoved,—the long, loud, stinging whirr, as the huge, thick bodied reptile shook his many-jointed rattle and adjusted his loops for the fatal stroke. His eyes were drawn as with magnets toward the circles of flame. His ears rung as in the overture to the swooning dream of chloroform. Nature was before man ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in such a state of diseased susceptibility that the most innocent words from Captain Wybrow would have been irritating to her, as the whirr of the most delicate wing will afflict a nervous patient. But this tone of benevolent remonstrance was intolerable. He had inflicted a great and unrepented injury on her, and now he assumed an air of ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... piano (he receives a new one every year,) stands in one window. The other window is always open and looks out on the park. There is a dovecote just opposite the window, and doves promenade up and down upon the roof of it, and fly about, and sometimes whirr down on the sill itself. That pleases Liszt. His writing-table is beautifully fitted up with things that match. Everything is in bronze—inkstand, paper-weight, match-box, etc.—and there is always a lighted candle standing on it by which he and the gentlemen can light ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... the people, saying, "The Lord hath given us a sign, and He will feed us, as He fed the people of Israel in the wilderness; for He has sent us a fine flight of fieldfares across the barren sea, so that they whirr out of every bush as ye come near it. Who will now run down into the village, and cut off the mane and tail of my dead cow which lies out behind on the common?" (for there was no horsehair in all the village, seeing that the enemy had long since carried ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... noises—shouts, shots, music, songs, laughter, rattle of dice, whirr of wheel and clink of glasses—assailed me discordant. The scores of tents and shacks stretching on irregularly had become pocked with dark spots, where lights had been extinguished, but the street remained ablaze and the desert without winked at the stars. There ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... and a whirr, and then came a number of shrill cries from the birds which were wounded. These the boys at once proceeded to put ...
— The Young Oarsmen of Lakeview • Ralph Bonehill
... that other sleeper, stretched at length, A spectre stripped of charm and shorn of strength, In yon dismantled chamber. Dreams she of girlhood's couch, the lavender Of country sheets, a roof where pigeons whirr And creamy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... along the river. Some crows followed the workers at a distance, hunting for grains of corn, and over in the woods, a chewink scratched and rustled among the deep leaves as it searched for grubs. From time to time a flock of quail arose before them with a whirr and scattered down the fields, reassembling later at the call of their leader, from a rider of the snake fence, which inclosed ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... playing their cards at midnight, after a small refection which the bailiff's wife had provided for them, when the rapid whirling of wheels was heard approaching their house, and caused the lady to lay her trumps down, and her heart to beat with more than ordinary emotion. Whirr came the wheels—the carriage stopped at the very door: there was a parley at the gate: then appeared Mrs. Betty, with a face radiant with joy, though her eyes were full of tears; and next, who is that tall young gentleman ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... little to know he may attract enemies as well as friends; and his cries have been heard by the eagle, who comes down like an avalanche, and, seizing him firmly in its great talons, carries him away higher and higher to the nest in the cliff. Then there is a whirr and swoop, and the mother or father eagle, whichever it is, alights on the rough platform in the cliff and lays the still warm and only half-dead woolly lamb before the young ones. There is not much chance for it ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... came. All together, too; none of those chivalrous magnanimities which one reads so much about —one courtly rascal at a time, and the rest standing by to see fair play. No, they came in a body, they came with a whirr and a rush, they came like a volley from a battery; came with heads low down, plumes streaming out behind, lances advanced at a level. It was a handsome sight, a beautiful sight—for a man up a tree. I laid my lance in rest and waited, with my heart beating, till the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Monk had given him that summer. He did not really care about the rod—he was not even thinking of it. He heard all the sounds of the house as he sat there. He could tell all the clocks, that one booming softly the half hours was in his mother's bedroom, there was a rattle and a whirr and there came the cuckoo-clock on the stairs, there was the fast, cheap careless chatter of the little clock on the schoolroom mantelpiece, there was the whisper of Miss Jones's watch which she had put out on the table to mark the time ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... man enters upon his first real sovereignty of nature. As we hear the whirr of the dynamo or listen at the telephone, as we turn the button of an incandescent lamp or travel in an electromobile, we are partakers in a revolution more swift and profound than has ever before been enacted upon earth. Until the nineteenth century fire was justly accounted the most useful and ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... all was made clear, for the line of Indians advanced obliquely towards the long grass till the leading man came almost in touch a couple of hundred yards in advance, when all at once there was the wild whirr of wings, and about a couple of dozen great birds ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... of view, when I was not so indifferent, and ask myself why I, a distinguished man, a privy councillor, am sitting in this little hotel room, on this bed with the unfamiliar grey quilt. Why am I looking at that cheap tin washing-stand and listening to the whirr of the wretched clock in the corridor? Is all this in keeping with my fame and my lofty position? And I answer these questions with a jeer. I am amused by the naivete with which I used in my youth to exaggerate the value of renown and of ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Long ere the whirr, and buzz, and rush Became a harvest sound, Or monsters trailed their tails of spikes, Or ploughed ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... times with the best and jolliest of little neighbours. A summer without Rob's cheery whistle and good-natured laugh would seem as empty and queer as the woods without the bird voices, or the meadows without the whirr of humming things. She ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... waiting till the story was done, the dragon-fly flew off with a whirr, and darted to and fro, hunting for its breakfast, glittering splendidly as it flashed among the leaves or darted close above the water. Daisy forgot her disappointment in a minute, and went fishing for lilies; while the ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... had been turned on. The whirr of the great engine and the clash of the planers in the big shop continued until six o'clock. Then the whistle blew, the engine slowed up, the men dropped their tools and ran for ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... train up in the pine woods were a novelty and a privilege. Our cloven-hoofed engine did not whirr turbulently along, like a thing of wheels. Slow and sure must the knock-kneed chewer of cuds step from log to log. Creakingly the wain followed him, pausing and starting and pausing again with groans of inertia. A very ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... "Whirr-r-r! whirr-r-r! whirr-r-r!" said the wind, and it tore through the streets of the city that Christmas eve, turning umbrellas inside out, driving the snow in fitful gusts before it, creaking the rusty signs and shutters, and playing every ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... preternaturally, clear. The falling of silence gave an amazing acuteness to his inner sense of hearing. Certain people are so made that they can, under certain conditions, and at certain moments, hear the workings of their neighbours' minds, as you and I can hear the whirr of machinery, or the cry of a child in the street. An ordinary man or woman can only hear a mind when lips, teeth, and tongue utter it with living sounds that set the air in vibration. These abnormal people hear, in these abnormal moments, the silent murmurs of the mind making no effort at all ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the house and put past her blankets, and out with a spinning-wheel and into a whirr of it, with a hummed song of the country at her lips—all in a mild temper, or to keep her confusion ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... seat, and at a signal from the station-keeper, who watched with paternal pride all the movements of the little prodigy, we dashed off at a pace rarely attained by post-horses. He had the faculty of emitting a peculiar sound—something between a whirr and a whistle—that appeared to have a magical effect on the team and every few minutes he employed this incentive. The road was rough, and at every jolt he was shot upwards into the air, but he always fell back into his proper position, and never ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... senses all was dark around him. A strange whirr sounded in his ears, coming from the car wheels, and telling him that the car was still ...
— The Young Bridge-Tender - or, Ralph Nelson's Upward Struggle • Arthur M. Winfield
... followed without difficulty. The warm summer air was fragrant with the scent of balsam, pine, and fern; pine needles carpeted the path; faint forest sounds came to their ears—the call of a loon from a distant lake, the whirr of a partridge, the chatter of a squirrel, the splash of falling water. Waldron took off his straw hat and tucked it under his arm, baring his forehead to the spice-laden breeze that now and then filtered through the forest, ...
— The Brown Study • Grace S. Richmond
... under them, ready to spring into the air. We cock our guns, agree to shoot respectively at the birds which go right or left or straight before us, and then advance to flush the covey ourselves. The staunch dog never winces as we pass her: two paces, three, a sudden rush and whirr as of many wings, five sharp reports in quick succession and four birds down! Another, wild with fright, rises straight up for twenty feet and darts off behind us, but his beautiful head droops as the crack of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... is full of sound—the rhythmic thud of the looms, shaking floor and walls, the click and rattle of the shuttles passing back and forward, and the steady whirr of the winding-wheels, like ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... of the gang, and could contract for men of his own. There was larger life in the land of resin and pine-logs. No tune in all broad Scotland was so merry as the whirr of the sawmill, when the little flashing ribbon of light runs before the swift-cutting edge of the saw. It made Sylvanus remember the pale sunshine his feet used to make on the tan-coloured sands of North Berwick, when he walked ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... the machine, ticking fast and lightly over the belts of the rough jeans pants. Whirr, whirr, yes, and Miss Sophie was actually humming a tune! She felt strangely ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... Public Library, and could be seen with the last four numbers of two weekly reviews before him, making himself acquainted with the habits of those days, and moving his lips as though in prayer. At ten each morning anyone in the corridor outside his room was startled by the whirr of an alarum clock; perfect silence followed; then rose a sound of shuffling, whistling, rustling, broken by sharply muttered words; soon from this turbid lake of sound the articulate, thin fluting of an old man's voice streamed forth. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... came to the edge of a wall with a little sunk glade beyond, and was looking across some blackberry bushes when I heard a rifle-shot, and the whirr of a bullet. I had just time to notice that the whirr came with the gunshot—if it had been in the opposite direction it would have followed it—when I was struck on the head and fell. It was the fall that knocked ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... drew up his powerful form as if to prove whether it were an equal match for such a foe. Then, raising his voice to such a pitch, that it sounded above the cries and groans of the fighting men, the words of command, the neighing of the horses, the crash of overthrown chariots, the dull whirr of lances and swords, their heavy blows on shields and helmets, and the whole bewildering tumult of the battle—with a loud shout he drew his bow, and his first ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... strange whirr and a clicking in the apartment beyond, as if some machinery was in motion. But then came a loud voice and the other sounds stopped. By getting down on his hands and knees Adam Adams was enabled to hear nearly all that was said in the place beyond ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... and behind them, here in the homeland, are the women, working as their men fight, with a grim and tireless determination. To-day the land hums with munition factories and huge works whose countless wheels whirr day and night, factories that have sprung up where the grass grew so lately. The terrible, yet glorious, days of Mons and the retreat, when her little army, out-gunned and out-manned, held up the rushing might of the German advance so long as life and ammunition ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... the window. I switched on all the lights. I have them arranged so for just that purpose of scaring off intruders. Then, as I looked out of my window on the second floor, I fancied I could see a dark figure slink into the shadow of the shrubbery at the side of the house. Then there was a whirr. It might have been an automobile, although it sounded differently from that—more like a motor boat. At any rate, there was no trace of a car that we could discover in the morning. The road had been oiled, too, and a car would have left marks. And yet some one was here. There ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... cartographer at his table beneath a shaded acetylene light drew maps and sketched, the magnetician was busy on calculations close by. The cook and messman often made their presence felt and heard. In the outer Hut, the lathe spun round, its whirr and click drowned in the noisy rasp of the grinder and the blast of the big blow-lamp. The last-named, Bickerton, "bus-driver" and air-tractor expert, had converted, with the aid of a few pieces of covering tin, into a forge. A piece of red-hot metal ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... passing alley after alley, till he came upon the end of one which looked fairly open, and which ran in the direction of the oast-house on the hill, Richard was about to plunge down this, when, all at once, there was a sharp, thin sound, followed by the loud whirr of wings, as an early covey of strongly-pinioned partridges, alarmed by the crack, sprang up, and flew over the tops of the poles, completely hidden ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... fork-tailed kite hawks for garbage and for the friendly lizard too, in the hospital compound. One night, as I lay in my tent looking to the moon-lit camp, Fritz, our little ground squirrel that lived beneath the table of the mess tent, met an untimely fate from a big white owl. A whirr of soft owl wings to the ground outside my tent, a tiny squeak, and Fritz had vanished ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... Wapping, looking down upon the silent deck of a schooner below. No smoke issued from the soot-stained cowl of the galley, and the fore-scuttle and the companion were both inhospitably closed. The quiet of evening was over everything, broken only by the whirr of the paddles of a passenger steamer as it passed carefully up the centre of the river, or the plash of a lighterman's huge sweep as he piloted his unwieldy craft down on the last remnant of the ebb-tide. In shore, various craft sat lightly on the soft Thames mud: ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... against telling the Ballawhaine by remembering an incident in the life of his father. It was about Philip's father, too; so Philip stretched his legs from the sofa towards the hearth, and listened to the old Auntie's voice over the whirr of her wheel, with another voice—a younger voice, an unheard voice—breaking: in at the back of his ears when the wheel stopped, and a sweet undersong inside of him always, saying, "Be sensible; there is no disloyalty; Pete is dead. Poor ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... here one could understand its insistence. So here the voices said only, "I wish—I wish," and "I choose this—and this," at windows; or, "If I had back my nickel...." "Don't you go expecting nothink!" And over these went the whirr of machinery, beat of treadles, throb of engines, or the silence of forced idleness, or of the disease of dereliction. It was a time of many pagan observances, as when some were decked in precious stuffs and some ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... pursuit. Hard pressed, Pau-Puk-Keewis reached the edge of the lake and besought a brant (or wild goose) to change him into one of themselves, and to make him ten times larger than the others. Straightway they changed him into an enormous brant, and, with a whirr of wings, the whole flock rose in the air and flew northward. "Take good heed and look not downward, lest some great mishap befall you," cried the other birds to Pau-Puk-Keewis, and he heeded their words. But on the ...
— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman
... the gift of clothing the old commonplaces with charm. But men with that great gift are not to be met with in every railway-carriage, or at every dinner. The man we actually meet is one whose joke, though we have signalled it a mile off, we are powerless to stop, whose opinions come out with a whirr as of clockwork. Besides, it always happens in life that the man—or woman—with whom we would like to talk is at the next table. Those who really have something to say to each other so seldom have a chance of ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... with bells was to cease it would have been pleasant to have rung it a few more times. It is an awful thing to contemplate that you have rung a bell for the last time. One can get very sentimental over a thing like that. Dear jolly old bells, what an influence they have upon life. How bravely they whirr at the arrival of a dear expected—how madly they riot to the tune Wedding—how sadly they toll when the last ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... the Humming-Bird, comes darting to our oriel, my Orient. As I sat sewing, his sudden, unexpected whirr made me look up. How did he know that the very first Japan-pear-bud opened this morning? Flower and bird came ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... motionless And poised in space... A great bird resting in its flight Between the alleys of the stars. It is the wind's hour off.... The wind has nestled down among the corn.... The two speak privately together, Awaiting the whirr of wings. ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... brothers and sisters. When I first saw Ruth there in the midst of the confusion of unpacking, the room in Irving Place with its old chests and samovars, Esther Claff quietly writing in her corner, the telephone bell muffled to an undisturbing whirr, flashed before me. ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... cheek, your senses easily detected the delicious odor of a distant garden of sweet roses. The sea sparkled with phosphorescence. Not a sound was heard except the panting of the hard-worked little donkey-engine and the whirr of the line as it came up taut and dripping from the ocean depths. The lamp, hanging from the mast, threw a bright glare on deck, presenting the strongest contrast with the black shadows, firm and motionless ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... were thus confined, without a single thing to break the stillness, they could not conceive. It seemed that hours had gone by, during which time there was nothing to disturb them, except the one steady whirr, broken occasionally by some remark by one or ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward
... it was created by insects alone I found my credulity taxed to its utmost limit; and it was not until I was solemnly assured by Mr Austin that such was the case that I quite believed it. It was not unlike the "whirr" of machinery, save that it rose and fell in distinct cadences, and occasionally—as if by preconcerted arrangement on the part of every individual insect in the district—stopped altogether for a few moments. Then, indeed, the ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... somewhat dim in the haze of battle, but the smoke and flash of the Allies' guns and the Turks' answering could be picked out without great difficulty. Added to this the air was still; the dull thud of the field guns at work there was different from the resounding boom of the naval guns, and the whirr of the machine guns ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... alarm comes again. There is no wind this time, and, what is worse, an ominous silence falls at dusk over the orchard and meadow. "Why is everything so still?" I ask myself. "Oh, of course—the katydids aren't talking—and the crickets, and all the other whirr-y things. Ah! That means ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... horses and the rattle of their harness were all the sounds he could hear. Naab returned to his seat; the team started, now no longer in a trot; they were climbing. After that Hare fell into a slumber in which he could hear the slow grating whirr of wheels, and when it ceased he awoke to raise himself and turn his ear to the back trail. By-and-by he discovered that the black night had changed to gray; dawn was not far distant; he dozed and awakened to clear light. A rose-red horizon lay far below and to the eastward; ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... whirr of little wings. He had flushed a covey of quail; but as his mind was at the time set on nobler game, and the chance for a shot not particularly good, he did not attempt to fire; though naturally his gun flew up to his shoulder ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... paces away, and held a mass meeting to protest; whereupon the father of all the dragon-flies, a magnificent warrior in a steel- blue armour, saw that a conspiracy was afoot, and swept into the midst with a whirr and a snap, a turn here and a flash there, that scattered the host in a twinkling of a ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... joy if the cushat sang Its low song in the fir; The cat, perhaps, broke the quiet with Its regular slow purr; 'Twas music now, and her wheel gave forth A rhythm in its whirr. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... curled like a hair among the dim black mountain tops. The machine flew lightly. Uncle Denny and Henderson talked quietly, and at last, under cover of their speech and the whirr of the engine, Pen began ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... change of location. In a gentlemanly way he informed me that the only vacant stateroom was a small one next the engine room below, but if I could endure the noise and wished to take it, I could do so. I preferred the proximity and whirr of machinery along with closer quarters to the company of the two adventuresses, so while both women slept late next morning I quietly and thankfully moved all my belongings below. Here I enjoyed the luxury of a room by myself for forty-eight hours, or until we reached ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... hands, but was unable to do so, so he lifted his voice instead! Yerkes, in the whirr of the machine, doubtless mistook the voice for that of the boy, for he paid ...
— Boy Scouts in an Airship • G. Harvey Ralphson
... up a live coal between the ends of two sticks, and holding it firmly in that manner, walked a little distance among the trees. Then swinging the sticks he hurled the coal far up among the boughs. There was an angry screech and whirr and Robert saw a swift shadow passing between his eyes ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... Mary's schooling were to be kept up, mother said, and father he were always liking to buy books, and go to lectures o' one kind or another—all which took money—so I just worked on till I shall ne'er get the whirr out o' my ears, or the fluff out o' my throat i' ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Irish, a language which seemed to be composed of rolling r's and booming gutturals. A sustained conversation sounds like the jolting of a country cart over a rocky road, a sudden exclamation like the whirr of a covey of partridges, an oath like the downfall of a truck-load of bricks. I arrived in time for the great pig fair, and Tuam was very busy. It is a poor town, of which the staple trade is religion. The country around is green ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... 'Whirr!' cried the Thier, breaking on some communication. 'Got her, have they? and swung her across stream? I'm one with ye for my share, or call ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Miller; why are you crying so?" "Alas!" answered the girl, "I have to spin straw into gold, and I do not know how to do it." "What will you give me," said the manikin, "if I do it for you?" "My necklace," said the girl. The little man took the necklace, seated himself in front of the wheel, and "whirr, whirr, whirr," three turns, and the reel was full; then he put another on, and whirr, whirr, whirr, three times round, and the second was full too. And so it went on until the morning, when all the straw was spun, and all the reels were full of gold. By daybreak the King ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... a "whirr-rr," the doors of the little carved clock on the wall new open and a cuckoo came out and piped ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... up the hill a rifle shot cracked. There was a whirr in the air and a bullet sang past us, cutting the red feather off ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... in his bed listening to the bird which was singing its very best. Suddenly it stopped with a jerk, and bang! something had snapped in its inside, and all its wheels ran down with a whirr, and then there was a ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... of serving God You sweep a room or turn a sod, And suddenly to your surprise You hear the whirr of seraphim And ?uid you're under God's own eyes And building palaces ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... Another soft whirr in the instrument, a momentary flash of light close around it, and, behold, the crow had turned from black ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... preoccupied during the dinner they had eaten together in the little back dining-room. The son noticed that the heat had told on his father, and he blamed himself for keeping him in this dusty, deserted town, while he completed his laboratory work. The electric cars made a great whirr, just around the corner, every few moments, and the little strip of park behind the house was full of the poor people who had crawled out of their hot holes to get some breathable air in the green spots abandoned by the rich. Jarvis Thornton cast his eyes lazily over ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... the grit of gravel under his feet and he heard the melancholy gurgle of running water. He took a step forward and groped his way into a little porch smelling horribly of mustiness and damp. As he did so, he heard a whirr behind him and the car began to glide off. Desmond shouted after the chauffeur. Now that he stood on the very threshold of his adventure, he wanted to cling desperately to this last link with his old self. But the chauffeur did not or would ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... window and the prospect from it. There was a romantic, old-world flavor about the gray pile opposite, its carvings and cloisters and chiming bells seemed so peaceful and so far removed from modern trouble. Sometimes indeed the whirr of a biplane would disturb the quiet as an airman flittered like a great dragon-fly over the city, reminding her that medieval times were past; while a bugle call from the neighboring barracks emphasized the fact that the world was at war. Not that Winona was likely to forget that! ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... suddenly, arrested. The noise she heard was not the grating noise of a car backing, it was the scream of a car getting away; it dropped to a heavy whirr and diminished. ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... the valley, they hunted the hill, The best of our lads wi' the best o' their skill; But still as the fairest she sat in their sight, Then, whirr! she was over, a mile at a flight. I ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... through the shed, above all the clatter of shuttles and whirr of wheels, and was repeated again, and again. There was a rush towards one point. The mighty engine stopped with a groan, and all the wheels were motionless. All the workers had deserted their posts,—nay,—not all. Dick stood shivering, grasping ...
— Yorkshire Tales. Third Series - Amusing sketches of Yorkshire Life in the Yorkshire Dialect • John Hartley
... and fly, as I expect, to the adjoining common, where they are marked down on a brow thickly clothed with furze. Marching towards them with spaniels at heel, up jumps a hare under my nose, then another, then a rabbit. I reload rapidly, and on reaching the gorse 'put in' the dogs. Whirr! there goes a partridge! The spaniels drop to the report of my gun, but the fluttering wings of the dying bird rouse two of his neighbours before I am ready, and away they fly, screaming loudly. The remainder are flushed in detail and ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... curling up their burning ends. Gleams of light in broken flashes glanced in all directions, especially upwards. Suddenly a white dove flew straight into the bright light, fluttered round and round in terror, bathed in the red glow, and disappeared with a whirr of ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... the lower thousand and two thousand-foot lanes. The lights of Tappen were dwindling beneath us. The interior of the Cometara was humming with the whirr of its circulators and air-receivers, mingled with the throb of air pressure pumps. At three thousand feet I started the air-rocket engines. They came on with a gentle purring. The fluorescence from them streamed ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... hours out of school in tramping over the pretty Connecticut hills, in search of game, or, lying down on the soft grass, would pass hours in gazing on the beautiful landscape, listening to the dull whirr of the partridges in the stubble-field or the dropping of the ripe apples in the orchard. The love of nature was strong in the boy, and his wonderful mistress taught him many of the profoundest lessons ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... and silvery essences flow In the rose-and-silver evening glow. Farewell, my lord Sun! The creeks overflow: a thousand rivulets run 'Twixt the roots of the sod; the blades of the marsh-grass stir; Passeth a hurrying sound of wings that westward whirr; Passeth, and all is still; and the currents cease to run; And the sea and the ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... his hound would roam, Where fed the timid deer, And where the partridge's drum, or whirr, Brought ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... moon rose high among the clouds; the busy hum of the city ceased; the din of war and warriors' roar was hushed. The music of the cricket, the whirr of the owlets, might easily have been heard, when the holy Dame and the Palmer met. The Abbess had chosen a solemn hour, to ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... unobstructed view of a lumberyard, beyond which frowned the blackened walls of a factory. The fence of the lumberyard was gay with theatre posters and illustrated advertisements of tobacco, whiskey, and patent baby foods. When the window was open, there was a constant clang and whirr of electric cars, varied by the screech of machinery, the clatter of empty wagons, or ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... and questioning, Von Barwig found the family he was looking for on the fourth floor of a crowded tenement house in Rivington Street. He heard the whirr of sewing machines and as he opened the door he saw the father of his pupil, and several others, all sewing rapidly as if for dear life. The six machines made such a noise he could barely hear the sound of his own voice. As soon as Branski saw Von Barwig, he jumped up ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... the day which he had selected the club-house was empty, and he had just resigned himself to a solitary game, when, with a whirr and a rattle, a grey racing-car drove up, and from it emerged the same long young man whom, a couple of days earlier, he had seen wriggle out from underneath the same machine. It was Reggie Byng's habit also not to allow anything, even love, to interfere with golf; and not even the ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the first movement. Perceiving his mistake, he kept straight on over my head; so of course there was nothing in sight when I turned. As an owl's flight is perfectly noiseless (the wing feathers are wonderfully soft, and all the laminae are drawn out into hair points, so that the wings never whirr nor rustle like other birds') I had heard nothing, though he passed close enough to strike, and I was listening intently. And so another mystery of the woods was made plain ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... loudly as to waken them once or twice. Near dawn they heard the howling of wolves and the curiously similar hooting of a horned owl. There is, indeed, almost no difference between the short opening howl of a she-wolf and the long hoot of the owl. As he listened, half awake, Rolf heard a whirr of wings which stopped overhead, then a familiar chuckle. He sat up and saw Skookum sadly lift his misshapen head to gaze at a row of black-breasted grouse partridge on a branch above, but the poor doggie was feeling too sick to take any active interest. They were not ruffed grouse, but a ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... that people in this country, and very largely in other nations, and in all languages have chosen and are using every day to express to one another a certain American quality or tone now abroad in our world—a certain hum, as one might say, or whirr ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... towards two o'clock (92 and 93 Fahr.), by which time every voice of bird or mammal was hushed; only in the trees was heard at intervals the harsh whirr of a cicada. The leaves, which were so moist and fresh in early morning, now become lax and drooping; the flowers shed their petals. Our neighbours, the Indian and Mulatto inhabitants of the open palm- thatched huts, as we returned home fatigued with our ramble, ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... that morning, Alida noticed things as she had never noticed them before. A sunbeam came through the shutterless window of the house and writhed and quivered on the wall as if it were a live thing. She read a warning in this, and in the color of the sun, that was red, like blood, and in the whirr of the grasshoppers, that was sinister and threatening. The creeks had dried, and their slimy beds crept along the willows like sluggish snakes. Gaunt range-cattle bellowed in their thirst, and the parched earth crackled beneath the sun that hung above the house like a flaming disk. Sometimes ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... good advice certainly, and the boys acted upon it. They walked up and down the banks of the river admiring the beautiful scenery, but seeing nothing of wild animals. They heard the whirr of a flock of birds overhead, alarmed by the apparition of two human beings, but the luxuriant vegetation allowed but a glimpse of them as they ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... not long before I heard a gentle whirr in the leaves overhead, and, looking up, saw two birds circling around the twig, but at some distance above it. Then one of them, the mother, of course, drew nearer and nearer in smaller and smaller circles, at the same time calling to her ...
— The Nursery, February 1878, Vol. XXIII, No. 2 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... from out of the Southward seemed nearing A whirr, as of wings Waved by mighty-vanned flies, Or by night-moths of measureless size, And in softness and smoothness well-nigh beyond ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... mountains rose up, where, with his limbs bound upon the hard rocks by galling fetters of bronze, Prometheus fed with his liver an eagle that ever rushed back to its prey. High above the ship at even they saw it flying with a loud whirr, near the clouds; and yet it shook all the sails with the fanning of those huge wings. For it had not the form of a bird of the air but kept poising its long wing-feathers like polished oars. And not long after ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... with his rifle ready. Suddenly Romer stiffened, then pointed. "There! Dad!—There!" I saw two gobblers wade into the brook not more than a hundred and fifty feet away. Drawing down with fine aim I fired. The bullet splashed water all over the turkeys. One with loud whirr of wings flew away. The other leaped across the brook and ran—swift as a deer—right up the slope. As I tried to get the sight on him I heard other turkeys fly, and the crack-crack of R.C.'s gun. I shot twice at my running turkey, and all I did ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... danced for joy, as, peeping at the hens, he hurried on his clothes. Hundreds were there pecking along like so many turkeys. It was the combined whirr of their wings that woke him so effectually; many an older person on the frontier has been deceived by the same sound, supposing it to be thunder, so heavy a noise do these wild fowl of the prairies make when numbers of them ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... were interrupted by a little whirr and clatter, which, thin and distant though it was, penetrated into her room. The whirr was followed by the voice, clear, self-confident and cheerful, of a cuckoo. Maggie was in an instant out of bed, into the passage and standing, in her nightdress, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... ears on the stretch for the footfalls of sorrow that never come, but be deaf to the whirr of the wings of ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... unfairly. Sword-factories had sprung up, since the breaking out of the war, along the little streams which emptied into the Mohawk, through the Oneida Valley; and some of them kept up the clink of the trip-hammers and the whirr of the emory-wheels that shaped and polished sword-blades, not far from West Falls. One day, in June, while his star seemed to be so certainly in the ascendant in the family of John Crawford, Mary and himself ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... poplars I am thinking of are alongside a stately old French mill, built, towered, and gabled, of fine grey stone; and the image of them brings up in my mind, with the draught and foam of the weir and the glassiness of the backwater, and the whirr of the horse-ferry's ropes, that some of the most delightful moments which one's bicycle can give, are those when the bicycle is resting against a boat's side (once also in Exmouth harbour); or chained to an old lych-gate; or, as I remarked about my Campagna ride, ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... soon that does it's turn. Up ye come, and tway chiels ram your head into a shottle in a door like, and your hands are clasped ahint ye, and swee gangs the door, and you upset headforemost, and in below the axe, and hangie just taps you on the neck to see that it's in the richt nick, and whirr, whirr, whirr, touch the spring, and down comes the thundering edge, loaded with at least a hunder weight o' lead—your head's aff like a sybo—Tuts, that's naething—onybody might mak up their mind to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 379, Saturday, July 4, 1829. • Various
... fourteenth century. To find its analogue, we must betake ourselves to the frescoes of Spinello Aretino, a master more decidedly Giottesque than his contemporary Taddeo di Bartolo.[156] A Gabriel, rushing down from heaven to salute Madonna, with all the whirr of arch-angelic pinions and the glory of Paradise around him, is a fine specimen of Spinello's vehemence. The same quality, more tempered, is noticeable in his frescoes of the legend of S. Ephesus ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... pellucid and comforting light of the blinded sun grew warmer; the hum of industry in the town behind rose cheerfully upon the quiet air, and as the calling of the April bluebird in the fields grew more faint, the splash of the oars and the whirr of the gray water-fowl began to be accompanied by a low distant ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... my Angora tabby: stroke them smoothly and they will purr and rub noses with you; but stroke them the wrong way and whirr! they scratch your hands and out of the window they fly! ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... his eye on our friend when the shriek and the whirr of the express from the north was heard. Lopez walked quickly up towards the edge of the platform, when the pundit followed him, telling him that this was not his train. Lopez then ran a few yards along the platform, not ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... glad, so glad, not sorry," was her dreamy response. She lapsed into silence as the somnolent drone of the motor and the whirr of the wheels caused the ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... away in low range after range to the blue mountains in the distance. It was strange indeed to him on the wide plains through which they scurried in wild haste to see the springbok rush away from the doubtful track at the first whirr of their wheels, or the bolder bustard stand and gaze among the long grass, with his wary eye turned sideways to look at them. Guy felt for the moment he had left Europe and its reminiscences now fairly behind him; in this free new world, he was free once more himself; his ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... then may grow bolder, And form and groove pans with our consciences clear; Drive each of the turners with skill beyond learners, And put in stout wire with our hearts full of cheer. Then take a burr and make it whirr, As the bottoms spin round like a "top;" And fit these tight, which is but right If we wish a ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... because they were merely storks, but, before she could identify them more correctly, they all suddenly rose in the air with a whirr like that of a hundred spinning looms—and the car ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... Ajax still, unwearied, long'd to hurl His spear at Hector of the brazen helm; But he, well skill'd in war, his shoulders broad Protected by his shield of tough bull's hide, Watch'd for the whizzing shafts, and jav'lins' whirr. Full well he knew the tide of battle turn'd, Yet held his ground, his trusty friends ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... the bridles of their horses, the thief with his arms trussed back and his doublet turned down upon his shoulders. By the side of the track the old dame was standing, fastening her red whimple once more round her head. Even as he looked one of the archers drew his sword with a sharp whirr of steel and stept up to the lost man. The clerk hurried away in horror; but, ere he had gone many paces, he heard a sudden, sullen thump, with a choking, whistling sound at the end of it. A minute later the bailiff and four of his men rode past ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... rough whirr like a flushing cock partridge, and goes off on contact with a tremendous bang. It is not as dangerous as it ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
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