"Pantomime" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... And loves a kiss beneath the berry. Then full many a shape hath he, All in said ubiquity: Now is he a green array, And now an "eve," and now a "day;" Now he's town gone out of town, And now a feast in civic gown, And now the pantomime and clown With a crack upon the crown, And all sorts of tumbles down; And then he's music in the night, And the money gotten by't: He's a man that can't write verses, Bringing some to ope your purses: He's a turkey, he's a goose, He's oranges unfit for use; He's a ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... coffee without waiting to be asked. I paid him a half-piastre for it, which is half the proper price, and utterly ignored his expostulation. He touched me on the shoulder, displayed the coin in the palm of his hand and went through a prodigious pantomime. I did not even try to appear interested. He ordered Suliman ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... capered thus in pantomime; then, as swiftly composing his features into a mask-like expression, he turned the handle and entered. On the big thermometer nailed outside the Orderly-room the mercury may have registered anything between twenty and thirty below zero, but inside Barrack-room ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... dance, the manager would strongly recommend the people to "Come forward, ladies and gentlemen, the show's just a-going to begin." The performance consisted of a short play, a comic song by "Billy," and a portion of the pantomime, "Jack and the Beanstalk," the whole lasting under half-an-hour. We gave about a score performances a day: it was very hard work, and, what was more, hot weather. I don't want to figure in these pages as a champion boozer—for I know that the Herald ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... came, so that you are here,' said Mrs Wititterly, who, by dint of lying on the same sofa for three years and a half, had got up quite a little pantomime of graceful attitudes, and now threw herself into the most striking of the whole series, to astonish the visitors. 'I am ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... it best that I should not show myself here to-night. No, there is no time for explanation now; you will understand later. Perhaps"—significantly—"sooner than you anticipate. Inspector Hartnett will go through the rest of this pantomime with you." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... struck his snuff-box sharply with the ends of his fingers, while he looked at the book, the doctor correctly interpreted the pantomime, which was a shock to his nerves, and ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... it was taken up by the famous John Law, the English goldsmith's son, who had become chief financial adviser of the Regent of France; and immediately the face of things underwent a change like the magic transformations of a pantomime. ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... was all too obviously produced by her sensations at sight of himself; and, after staring at her for a moment, he allowed his own expression to become one of painful fatigue. Then he slowly swung about, as if to return into that side-yard obscurity whence he had come; making clear by this pantomime that he reciprocally found the sight of her insufferable. In truth, he did; for he was not only her neighbour but her first-cousin as well, and a short month older, though taller than she—tall beyond his years, taller than need be, in fact, and still in knickerbockers. However, ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... after marvels and magic, which make you the dupe of one charlatan after another. Take up science, for a change; study natural philosophy; try and acquire accurate notions of the system under which we live; realise that we are not moving on the stage of a Christmas pantomime, but in a universe governed by fixed laws, in which the miraculous performances you describe to me never can, and never could, have taken place. And be sure of this, that any book and any teacher, however admirable their moral ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... flat panel vanishes, and, behold, a species of cupboard with many shelves, upon which anything of a moderate size may be placed. Having deposited my letter on one of the shelves, it disappears, with the cupboard, like a pantomime trick, and the panelled window resumes its original dull aspect. But whether my document will reach the rightful owner, I can never ascertain, for days elapse, and no reply is forthcoming. Varying my proceedings at the torno, I sometimes express a desire to exchange a few greetings with ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... enchanting pantomime, took a step towards her; but she raised her hand pleadingly, restrainingly, and he paused. With his eyes he asked her mutely why. She did not answer, but, all at once transformed into a thing of abundant sprightliness, ran down the hillside, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... have suggested. I did go through the pantomime of washing my hands of an affair I considered definitely ended. I had resisted an irrepressible impulse to see and talk with Miss Challoner again, and was pleased with my firmness. Unaware of the tragic blow which had just fallen, I was full of self-congratulations ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... asked Harvey if he had seen old Turner, the landscape painter, since his death, which had taken place not very long before. The reply was "Yes," and I then asked what he was doing, the reply being a pantomime of painting. I then asked if Harvey could bring Turner there, to which the reply was, "I do not know; I will go and see," upon which Miss A. said, "This influence [Harvey's. Editor] is going away—it is gone"; ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... at the worst, is still better than a concert merely for the ear, or a pantomime entertainment for the eye. Supposing the articulation to be wholly unintelligible, we have an excellent union of melody and harmony, vocal as well as instrumental, for the ear. And, according to Sir Richard Steele's account of Nicolini's action, 'it was so ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... nothing to him—positively nothing—Her eyes gleamed. He let her take a good look at the money before replacing it, then tossed her a silver quarter-rupee piece, saluted Miss McClean again—for she was watching the pantomime from the doorway still—and mounted and rode off, his back looking like the back of one who has neither care nor fear ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... has sent you to the aid of a barbarian who was pitilessly murdering the mother tongue of Tasso. Formerly," continued he, "pantomime answered to talk with women as well as language; now, however, I must explain myself in another manner. I cannot, therefore, ask you to be the interpreter of my ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... horse to a cacao-stem, and sat on a log among hothouse ferns, peeling oranges with a bowie-knife beneath the burning mid-day sun, the quaintest fancy came over me that it was all a dream, a phantasmagoria, a Christmas pantomime got up by my host for my special amusement; and that if I only winked my eyes hard enough, when I opened them again it would be all gone, and I should find myself walking with him on Ascot Heath, while the snow whirled over the heather, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... with spears. Twenty musicians followed, blowing a hideous discord through pipes of reeds. Arrived, he seated himself on the ground "like a monkey," as Le Moyne has it in the grave Latin of his "Brevis Narratio." A council followed, in which broken words were aided by signs and pantomime. A treaty of alliance was made, and Laudonniere had the folly to promise the chief that he would lend him aid against his enemies. Satouriona, well pleased, ordered his Indians to aid the French at their work. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... great fancy and droll imagination, and having looked at the characters, she and I composed a history about them, which was recited to the little folks at night, and served as our FIRESIDE PANTOMIME. ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the corrupt and corrupting Ministry in his comedy, Mr Pasquin proceeds to exhibit the rehearsal of his tragedy, The Life and Death of Common Sense. Here the satirist, leaving politics, applies his cudgel mainly to the prevailing taste for pantomime, a form of entertainment introduced it was said some thirty years previously by one Weaver, a country dancing master, and already lashed by Sir Richard ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... us a song, so unutterably funny that we were dissolved in inextinguishable laughter; and then, from behind a curtain, began to come boys in black, one after another, as the imps in a pantomime come from a place I dare not mention, to chase the clown to his destruction. I counted twelve of them and grew dizzy. They ranged themselves in a row, with their hands behind them, and began screeching Tennyson's "Miller's Daughter" ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... to the Eastern immigrant, whose preconceived ideas of them were borrowed from the ballet or pantomime; they did not wear scalloped drawers and hats with jingling bells on their points, nor did I ever see them dance with their forefingers vertically extended. They were always neatly dressed, even the commonest of coolies, and their festive dresses were marvels. As traders ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... swung over his head, and his life threatened by the pirate's boatswain, demanding more money, after all had been taken. A Genoese messmate, Iachimo, shortened to plain "Jack" by the "Mexican's" crew, came to see my brother one day, and at the dinner table he went through the whole adventure in pantomime, which we children watched with wide-eyed terror and amusement. For there was some comedy mixed with what had been so nearly a tragedy, and Jack made us see the very whites of the black cook's eyes, who, favored by his color, ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... humourous as himself. Add to this, that when a Man is in his good Grace, he has a Mimickry that does not debase the Person he represents; but which, taking from the Gravity of the Character, adds to the Agreeableness of it. This pleasant Fellow gives one some Idea of the ancient Pantomime, who is said to have given the Audience, in Dumb-show, an exact Idea of any Character or Passion, or an intelligible Relation of any publick Occurrence, with no other Expression than that of his Looks and Gestures. If all who have been obliged to these Talents in Estcourt, will be at Love for ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... and his plump companion, were engaged in conversation, on the strange incidents which had passed, Fathom acted a very expressive pantomime with this fair buxom nymph, who comprehended his meaning with surprising facility, and was at so little pains to conceal the pleasure she took in this kind of intercourse, that several warm squeezes were interchanged between her and her lover, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... with claret and Tom Sheridan. This visit, and the occasion of it, is a profound secret, and therefore I tell it to nobody but you and Mrs. Reynolds. Through the medium of Wroughton, there came an invitation and proposal from T.S., that C.L. should write some scenes in a speaking pantomime, the other parts of which Tom now, and his father formerly, have manufactured between them. So, in the Christmas holydays, my brother and his two great associates, we expect, will be all three damned together: this is, I mean, if Charles's ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... again in a ludicrously nervous manner, explaining to him afterward that that is the way he—meaning the shy fellow—walks into a room; or, turning to him with "This is the way you shake hands," proceeds to go through a comic pantomime with the rest of the room, taking hold of every one's hand as if it were a hot plate and flabbily dropping it again. And then they ask him why he blushes, and why he stammers, and why he always speaks in an almost inaudible tone, as if they thought he did it on purpose. ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... to make a drawing, with my finger, in the sand, of a mule in the water; while I imitated by pantomime the struggles of the drowning. I then pointed to myself; and, using my arms as in swimming, shook my head and my finger to signify that I could not swim. I worked an imaginary paddle, and made him understand that I wanted him to paddle me across the river. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... were two things from which Uel extracted great pleasure; Syama always had money to pay promptly for everything he bought; in the next place, communication with him was astonishingly easy. His eyes made up for the deficiency in hearing; while his signs, gestures, and looks were the perfection of pantomime. Of evenings the child never tired ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... Outside, who worked as though it was a real stage, and they were real players, and there were great audiences to see them. It was all quite wonderful, and it involved certain posings, attitudes, mimicry and pantomime, for they were really ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that poisoning is not always disagreeable in some stages of the process), I resolved to go to the play. It was Covent Garden Theatre that I chose; and there, from the back of a centre box, I saw Julius Caesar and the new Pantomime. To have all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern taskmasters they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful effect. But the mingled reality ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... English made by the beach-combers again and again and yet again, and were in no way enlightened. It was impossible to understand. Then at last they made out that there was question of a whale. Next it appeared the whale was dead; and finally, after a prolonged pantomime of gesturing and pointing, Moran guessed that the beach-combers wanted the use of the "Bertha Millner" to trice up the dead leviathan while the oil and whalebone ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... seen. There's my daughter over there. Ain't she a stunner? Say, she's a gal as is a gal. Best trapeze worker in the business, if I do say it myself. And 'er mother was the best columbine that ever appeared in a Drury Lane pantomime, poor lass." He abruptly passed ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... to publish it, and receive the homage of all the learning and talent in Europe; which is the kind of debut I had hoped he would make in life, instead of putting on a foolish dress and stamping about on a stage, and squalling love songs to a packed house, making pantomime with his hands, and altogether behaving like an idiot,—a crowd of people ready to hiss him at the slightest indication of weakness, or to carry him on their shoulders if they fancied his ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... tell what I have been seeing at the theatre, and should tell it much better had not the charms of Countess Ferris's conversation engaged my mind, which would otherwise perhaps have been more seized on than it was, by the sight of an old pantomime, or wretched farce (for there was speaking in it, I remember), exploded long since from our very lowest places of diversion, and now exhibited here at Padua before a very polite and a very literary audience; ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... greater difficulty, and nothing but some ferocious pantomime and a shilling persuaded him to forego a ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... primitive habits and simple tastes are evinced by their all eating off the same plate and drinking from nearly the same wine-glass,—too happy if some better-off acquaintance at the long table invites them to "wine," though the ceremony on their part is limited to the pantomime of drinking. To this miserable tiers etat I belonged, and bore my fate with unconcern; for, alas, my spirits were depressed and my heart heavy. Lucy's treatment of me was every moment before me, contrasted with her gay and courteous demeanor to all save myself, and I longed for the ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... pantomime through the flowers that stood on the window-sill, not ill-pleased, and was waiting her son's return. An hour passed, and he did not come. Another hour, and she began to grow anxious. When it was near midnight, she roused her nearest neighbor and asked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... Marcy, who thought he knew the meaning of this pantomime. "You remind me of old Uncle Toby. He had money which he lost because he hid it in the ground instead of putting it where it ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon
... dust, and under no provocation could he be induced to speak. After midday he indicated by lifting his fingers to his mouth that he intended to go in search of food; having worked Leh Shin's assistant into a state of perspiring wrath by the simple process of reiterating in pantomime that he was dumb. It must be admitted that Coryndon got no small amount of pleasure out of his morning's entertainment, and he doubled himself up as though in pain as he dragged himself back to ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... impatient, but I made up my mind that I would continue silent and see how long a time she would consider necessary to give due effect to her little pantomime. Comedy? Or was it tragedy? I suppose full five minutes passed thus in our double silence; and that is a long time when two persons are sitting opposite each other alone ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... child's answer was in pantomime. For she had clung to Mrs. Laval as the lady had clasped her; and Matilda's head nestling in her neck and softly returning a kiss or two, ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... grain Province, had seldom seen rice in the blade or the ear, and least of all would have believed that, in time of deadly need, men would die at arm's length of plenty, sooner than touch food they did not know. In vain the interpreters interpreted; in vain his two policemen showed by vigorous pantomime what should be done. The starving crept away to their bark and weeds, grubs, leaves, and clay, and left the open sacks untouched. But sometimes the women laid their phantoms of children at Scott's feet, looking back ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... He must have been a mesmerist. Red fire ran over the stage, steam hissed, the orchestra rattled, and the bass roared. Finally, to tinkling bells and fourth of July fireworks, the curtain fell on the silliest pantomime I ever saw. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... few final words (they were final) and a few final signs. Amongst the last Kate observed distinctly this, and distinctly she understood it. First drawing Calderon's attention to the gesture, as one of significant pantomime, by raising her forefinger, the lady snuffed out one of the candles. The young man answered it by a look of intelligence, and all three passed down the steps together. The lady was disposed to take the cool air, and accompanied them to the garden-gate; but, in passing down the walk, Catalina ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... concerned in modern civilization, the German race is the only one which, up to the present century, had contributed nothing classic to the common stock of European wit and humor; for Reineke Fuchs cannot be regarded as a peculiarly Teutonic product. Italy was the birthplace of Pantomime and the immortal Pulcinello; Spain had produced Cervantes; France had produced Rabelais and Moliere, and classic wits innumerable; England had yielded Shakspeare and a host of humorists. But Germany had borne no ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... opened the door, started back, then stepped out and closed it after him. At the kitchen table Mrs. Toomey saw the pantomime and ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... Certainly, the pantomime was inimitably got up, but it had all been arranged by Moggy, the corporal, and the others. There was not one man of the crew who had not been sworn to secrecy, and whose life would have been endangered if, by undeceiving ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... forward, and vehement tossing of long streaks of heads and arms on the blinds, resembled the action of a violent domestic scene, in which the angry passions were strenuously engaged. I hardly knew what to conclude from this incoherent pantomime. Either Astraea was there, in the midst of a stormy contention; or she had left the house, and they were disputing furiously over the causes ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... Persian words seems also to be altogether lost upon his warped and blunted powers of understanding, and it is only by an elaborate use of pantomime that I finally succeed in making my wants understood. He possesses the simple hospitable instincts of a child of Nature's broad solitudes; he leads the way for over a mile to put me on the now scarcely perceptible continuation of the trail, and with a worshipfully anxious face he ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... 4000 feet to about 1200 feet in four gigantic loops, and, as one writer said: "He was doing exactly what the clown in the pantomime does when he climbs to the top of a staircase and rolls deliberately over and over until he reaches the ground. But this funny man stopped before he reached the ground, and took his last flight as gracefully as a ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... thought, might be vacant; no one appeared to live in it very long. At least the moving van seemed to have acquired a habit of stopping there; the one on the left had a more stable tenant; a lady who appeared in the pantomime, or the opera, he wasn't sure which,—only, foreign people sometimes went in ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... account of their rareness, Caius was pleased with the birds fighting for the fruits, and with the violence wherewith the spectators seized upon them: and here he perceived two prodigies that happened there; for an actor was introduced, by whom a leader of robbers was crucified, and the pantomime brought in a play called Cinyras, wherein he himself was to be slain, as well as his daughter Myrrha, and wherein a great deal of fictitious blood was shed, both about him that was crucified, and also about Cinyras. It was also confessed that this was the same day wherein ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... later, the party had evacuated their position, bag and baggage, "carrying their wounded," who, from the stern-sheets of their boat, shook his fist in savage pantomime at the innocent La Salle and his amused companions. Some weeks later he learned that a single large shot had, without piercing the cloth, raised a contusion about the size of a pigeon's egg, on muscles whose comfort, for a fortnight after, emphatically tabooed ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... told largely in pantomime by players, whose words are suggested by their actions, assisted by certain descriptive words thrown on the screen, and the whole produced by ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... The gain to the Brownings was shadowed by a sense of loss. "Christmas came," says Mrs Browning, "like a cloud." For the length of three winter months she did not stir out of doors. Then arrived spring and sunshine, carnival time and universal madness in Florence, with streets "one gigantic pantomime." Penini begged importunately for a domino, and could not be refused; and Penini's father and mother were for once drawn into the vortex of Italian gaiety. When at the great opera ball a little figure ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... puts on emu feathers and gazes about him in stupid fashion, like an emu bird; he makes a structure of boughs like the chrysalis of a Witchetty grub—his favorite food, and drags his body through it in pantomime, gliding and shuffling to promote its birth. Here, difficult and intricate though the ceremonies are, and uncertain in meaning as many of the details must always probably remain, the main emotional gist is clear. It is not that the Australian ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... on the top of the hill, and the entrance was on the far side, between two rocks, like the entrance to a cave. I went as far in as the bend, and, looking round the corner, saw a shining face. It was big and ugly, like a pantomime mask, and the brightness of it waxed and dwindled, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to be hangers on and applauders in the train of that tyrant who has overthrown the hopes of France. To all that cruelty and injustice by which thousands of hearts are now bleeding, they appear entirely insensible. They speak with heartless levity of the revolutions of France, as of a pantomime got up for their diversion. Their time and thoughts seem to be divided between defences of American slavery and efforts to attach themselves to the skirts of French tyranny. They are the parasites of parasites—delighted if they can but get to an ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... incident I saw rehearsed: the little fat father lay on the dusty stage, with one eye on the O.P. side. As soon as the massive form of Titiens bore down upon him he rolled over and over out of the way. This pantomime highly amused all of us, the ever-jovial Titiens in particular, and she again and again rushed laughingly in, but with ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... chairman of the Committee for the Prevention of Cruelty to Stage Animals. There is good work to be done here. We have always understood that the hind-legs of the Pantomime dragon suffer terribly while on the stage, owing to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... (And will you draw your chair back—you're incommoding the cabinet.) I never saw anything so unsuitable and unbecoming in my life—at this hour of the day too. Why, you're just like a whirligig out of a pantomime. If you think you can carry off that kind of thing you're very ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... had great Influence. The Cardinal listens to him very graciously, and by and by comes down the President Pasquier to interrogate me, to whom I told a plain Tale, setting forth how I had been unfortunate in Business in Holland and Flanders, and was earning an honest Livelihood by playing a Dog in a Pantomime. The people in the Wine-shop could not but bear me out in stating that I had come across the Red-faced Man by pure Accident, and was no Friend of his. It was moreover established by the Police, that I had not been seen in ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... very matter of fact. "I'm a married man; I'm going to support my wife!" He ran his fingers through his thick blond hair in ridiculous pantomime of terrified responsibility. "Yes, sir! I'm out for dollars. Well, I'm glad I haven't any near relations to get on their ear, and try and mind my business for me. Of course," he ruminated, "Bradley will kick like a steer, when I tell him he's bounced! ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... and in one place were Dorothy and Ozma, who quickly recognized Glinda and the Wizard through the glass windows of the boat. Glinda saw them, too, and held the boat close to the Dome while the friends exchanged greetings in pantomime. Their voices, unfortunately, could not be heard through the Dome and the water and the side of the boat. The Wizard tried to make the girls understand, through signs, that he and Glinda had come to their ...
— Glinda of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... variations with the acts that accompany or precede them. Animals evidently understand these inflections at once. We cannot better compare the language of animals than with what takes place in a pleasant sport, a kind of pantomime of the voice or language which many youth doubtless understand, and which I venture to refer to here to aid in more easily conceiving of the communication of thought among animals by sounds which seem to us all ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... As Instinct teaches, or as Humour wills; And, as the grave or gay her talent calls, Acts in the drama, till the curtain falls. First, how her little breast with triumph swells, When the red coral rings its golden bells! To play in pantomime is then the rage, Along the carpet's many-colour'd stage; Or lisp her merry thoughts with loud endeavour, Now here, now there—in noise and mischief ever! A school-girl next, she curls her hair in papers, And mimics father's gout, and mother's vapours; ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... hidden among palms, india-rubber plants and flowers, was first seen like a scene on the stage. There was a spasm of surprise. Roland, dazzled by such luxury, muttered an oath, and felt inclined to clap his hands as if it were a pantomime scene. They then went into the first drawing-room, a small room hung with dead gold and furnished to match. The larger drawing-room—the lawyer's consulting-room, very simple, hung with light salmon-color, was ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... and hands he made exuberant motions of eating rice and washing clothes; and the Chinaman, who concealed his distrust of this pantomime under a collected demeanour tinged by a gentle and refined melancholy, glanced out of his almond eyes from Jukes to the hatch and back again. "Velly good," he murmured, in a disconsolate undertone, and hastened smoothly along the decks, dodging obstacles in his course. He disappeared, ducking low ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... disreputable and disgraced tragedian. The episode is referred to by the artist in three of his contemporary caricatures, labelled respectively, Wolves Triumphant, or a Fig for Public Opinion; A Scene from the Pantomime of Cock-a-Doodle-Doo, lately performed at Drury Lane with unbounded applause; and the Hostile Press, or Shakespeare in Danger, all of which contain perhaps the best theatrical portraits of the popular tragedian which ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... I can feel with her," cried La Belle Colette, jumping to her feet, and rushing through a pantomime of fiendish rage, which made the men laugh to exhaustion. As she sat down she said with emphasis, "She must find him, and through you. I shall help, and so will our friend Dillon. It's an outrage ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... Mr. Barker had finished this story they had arrived at the theatre, and were just seated in the front row of a box, as the curtain drew up. The two boys liked the play very much, although it made them rather dull; but they were merry enough when the pantomime began, for it was full of fun, from beginning to end, and Charles could not help exclaiming every now and then, "Oh, ...
— More Seeds of Knowledge; Or, Another Peep at Charles. • Julia Corner
... once this has been done she has a valuable means of amusing them and bringing them within her control at any time. She may hum one of the songs or play it. The children must guess what it is and then act out their guess in pantomime, so that she can see what they mean. Perhaps it is a windmill song; their arms fly around and around in time to the music, now fast, now slow. Perhaps it is a Spring song; the children are birds building their nests. Other songs turn them into shoemakers, ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... has good introductions and knows how to comport oneself, one makes much"—and he rubbed his thumb and fingers together, according to the national code of pantomime. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... dedicated to the god a group of young men passed and repassed, assuming noble and expressive attitudes, for the ancients danced with the whole body. Their dance, very different from ours, was a sort of animated procession, something like a solemn pantomime. Almost always this religious dance was accompanied by chants in honor of the god. The group singing and dancing at the same time was called the Chorus. All the cities had their festival choruses in which the children of the noblest families participated ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... he sometimes volunteered Exaggerated dramatic pantomime Void in her heart, a place made ready for disasters to come Would have liked him to be blind only so ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Immortals of the French Academy • David Widger
... hand the Automaton carried a five-branched candlestick, for what purpose none seemed to know. Yet all bowed and quaked at every pantomime motion of the figure, ready to do the bidding of the least ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... an expressive pantomime of an overladen foot-soldier up and down the room, in time to the music. The only person who didn't laugh was James—which I ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... as in a dream, assailing the Chinaman with her gestures, advancing on him, threatening him, expostulating with him, but all in pantomime. There was something absurd about it, as absurd as a moving-picture film which carries the ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... cried, stopping the word that was on my lips; "I tell you, I hate holidays. The shops look merry, do they, with their bright toys and their green branches? The pantomime is crowded with merry hearts, is it? The circus and the show are brimful of fun and laughter, are they? Well, they all make me miserable. I haven't any pretty-faced girls or bright-eyed boys to take to the circus or the show, and all the nice girls ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... leans forward watching with the greatest tension. The KING, exalted with his mood of selfsacrifice kneels, removes his crown and lays it in the hands of the PRIEST. HOLGER crouching in the shadow quivers with anticipation. Again the pantomime of hope and failure. The PRIEST turns back to the KING and raises his arm in the customary gesture. The KING starts to rise then suddenly as though overcome at this spiritual defeat sinks again to his knees before the altar and buries his face in his hands, praying. The PRIEST stands ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... brother Hour. I am wrong id the story, I believe—Canzade was his wife—but Lucy may represent the one, and the Dominie the other. And then this lively crack-brained Scotch lawyer appears like a pantomime at the end of a tragedy.—And then how delightful it will be if ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... eloquent gestures, including the pantomime of swinging a whip, before the Martian understood and complied. After he backed into the circle of his fellows, Cleve dropped the cruel overseer manner and turned with satisfaction to Larkin. "I think there will be no trouble at all," he said. "Tomorrow we'll really get down to cases. ...
— The Terrible Answer • Arthur G. Hill
... the fellow began to think himself an object of more than common attention. His satisfaction at this distinction was somewhat heightened, at observing a smile on the face of the captain, which, although it might be thought grim, certainly denoted satisfaction. This pantomime occupied the time they were passing a hollow, and concluded as they rose another hill. Here the captain and his sergeant both dismounted, and ordered the party to halt. The two partisans each took a pistol from his holster, a movement that excited no suspicion ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... the valley seems completely shut in by a mountainous barrier of rugged rock. On advancing, however, a few steps farther, the great jagged rocks, which appeared a compact mass, divide, and, like the transformation-scene in a pantomime, the oasis of El Kantra, which is situated immediately south of the pass, lies before you. The opening is so narrow that it affords but room for the road and the stream, which is crossed by a bridge of Roman construction, restored by the late emperor ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... never knew anybody to talk faster, or give out more ideas, or wave his hands harder,—like this." Preciosa cast her muff away completely and abandoned her plump little fingers to unbridled pantomime. "The room was peopled—isn't that the way they say it, peopled?—in no time; a regular reception. There were ladies in Greek draperies seated on big cogged wheels with factory chimneys rising behind, and strong young fellows in leather ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... wonderful person to look at—but a little unaccountable, especially with the gorgeous clothes she wore, in their circle. Rose took her time about deciding that she liked her but ended by preferring her to all the rest. She never talked much; would smoke and listen, making most of her comments in pantomime, but she had a trick of capping a voluble discussion with a hard-chiseled phrase which, whether you felt it precisely fitted or not, you found it ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... couple, evidently, from what I learned from my comedian, never embarrassed, very wide awake, content with his lot, liking nothing so much as the theater—above all the provincial theater—where he and his wife had played in drama, vaudeville, comedy, operetta, opera comique, opera, spectacle, pantomime, happy in the entertainment which began at five o'clock in the afternoon and ended at one o'clock in the morning, in the grand theaters of the chief cities, in the saloon of the mayor, in the barn of the village, without boots, without patches, without orchestra, ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... trifles of this kind, to which Sheridan condescended for the advantage of the theatre, was the pantomime of Robinson Crusoe, brought out, I believe, in 1781, of which he is understood to have been the author. There was a practical joke in this pantomime, (where, in pulling off a man's boot, the leg was pulled off with it,) which the famous Delpini laid claim ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... said abruptly, hoping to draw public attention from the pantomime. "Ought to get off as soon as possible, or we'll ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... pronounced the word, the fixity of his gaze, his trembling hands, his body shrinking back into itself, while his feet seemed riveted to the earth, all presaged something terrible and frightful. He saw what he was about to relate, he made you see it; the conjunction, aided by the actor's pantomime, opened infinite perspectives to the imagination; his words had only to specify the fact, and to justify the emotion which had accumulated ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... Pastoral; a Romantic Farce; Bruce, a Chronicle Play; Smith, a Tragic Farce; Scaramouch in Naxos, a Pantomime. With a frontispiece and cover design by Aubrey Beardsley. Printed at the Ballantyne Press, London. Small 4to. 294 pp. ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... earliest part of man's history the subjects of his discourse must have been almost wholly sensuous, and therefore readily expressed in pantomime. Not only was pantomime sufficient for all the actual needs of his existence, but it is not easy to imagine how he could have used language such as is now known to us. If the best English dictionary and grammar had been miraculously furnished to him, together with the ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... map revives her words, the spot, the time, And the thing we found we had to face before the next year's prime; The charted coast stares bright, And its episode comes back in pantomime. ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... That little run forward means that she sees him coming. She falls at his feet; she kisses them. He raises her—I suppose that panther spring from the ground means that he raises her. She caresses him with much fondling and many kisses. By Jove, what pantomime! Now she dances to please him. She stops and trembles; the dance does not satisfy. She tries another. No! No! Not that! It is too dreamy—the lover is in a martial mood. This time she strikes his fancy. Kara is playing a wild Hungarian ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... friend! thy day, though rife With its toil, hath ended soon; We have had our share of strife, Tumblers in the mask of life, In the pantomime ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... moment from their place of command at either side of the field, brought with it all the confusion of a Parliamentary transformation scene. Nothing could have been more strictly in the nature of the burlesque effects of a Christmas pantomime than Walpole and Pulteney shot up into the House of Lords, and Wilmington and Sandys set to carry on the government of ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... himself stalked into sight among the men forward. Coming round the corner of the deck-house, he stopped at the galley door like a crow outside a hut, waiting. We watched him getting a light for his cigarette at the galley door with much dignified pantomime. The negro cook of the Lion, holding out to him in the doorway a live coal in a pair of tongs, turned his Ethiopian face and white ivories towards a group of sailors lost in the contemplation of the proceedings.' And, when ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... shrubs grow on each side of the avenue, and in the bright sunshine the whole forms a very beautiful picture. It is unfortunate that the effect reminds one somewhat forcibly of a transformation scene of a pantomime and thus appears artificial although in reality, it is absolutely natural. The resemblance is still further strengthened by the numerous ladies of the ballet who leisurely stroll along clothed in nature's ebony black. No one seems to know the origin of the name of the town, for the Banana ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... do you, and tell me you refuse to work! You with your insolence! When you fall and that long neck of yours goes crack" (he snapped a finger and thumb together in expressive pantomime), "then I shall laugh—nom ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... for war I discovered to be my snake-eyed friend. He seemed to be having difficulty with the language, and was eking out his Pidgin-English with pantomime. ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... decisive storm to make themselves masters at last of all the fortifications, and therefore of the town itself. But as emerging from the mine, they sprang exulting upon the shattered bulwark, a transformation more like a sudden change in some holiday pantomime than a new fact in this three years' most tragic siege presented itself to their astonished eyes. They had carried the last defence of the old counterscarp, and behold—a new one, which they had never dreamed of, bristling before their eyes, with a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... became her In hue of exercise That tinged her cheek with roses; And, dancing in her eyes, Were pantomime suggestions Of ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... this discussion—in which one side roared his displeasure and the other answered in pantomime between shouts of his own laughter—there came another knock at the door, and the owner of the Monet walked in. He, too, was in a disturbed state of mind. He had heard some things during the day bearing directly on Jack's credit, and had brought a bill ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... sorry that the distance they were from me rendered hearing what they were saying impossible; very soon, however, the frame of my open window provided me with a living picture which would have been actually spoiled had the human voice disturbed its eloquent pantomime. ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... opposite, and the girl cast a quick glance in that direction; she seemed to be measuring a distance she was impatient to traverse, and moved a step forward at the same time, uttering some short sentence with rapid gesticulation. The pantomime was perfectly intelligible to the Boy, who understood that she was feverishly anxious to carry out some intention on the instant. The lady seemed to hesitate, then, laying her beautiful white ungloved ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... deal—as a pantomime, a distorted caricature of Goethe, and a thoroughly inartistic production. But it proved the greatest of all Henry's financial successes. The Germans who came to see it, oddly enough, did not scorn it nearly as much as the English who were sensitive on behalf of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... pretend to nothing more than the flattery of our senses by means of form and sound and colour, the wizards of "the new art" claim to express the most profound and subtle emotions. We prefer "1830" to The Miracle, because it is unpretentious and sincere. We prefer OEdipus to the pantomime because it is prettier and shorter. As works of art they all seem to ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... tempestuous and withal exacting public. Polybius[68] relates that the visit of a troupe of Greek actors to Rome was a failure because of their over-staid deportment, until, learning the desires of the volatile Italians, they improvised a vastly more vivid pantomime depicting a mock battle, with huge success. Assuredly the early Roman comedian must have acted with greater abandon and clownish drollery, if not with the elaborate histrionic technique of the later actor.[69] We have heard Dr. Charles Knapp relate that the performance of the Ajax ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... both. He divined the dreadful thing he was stumbling upon even before he noted the sign in large letters on the back of a folding chair: "Jeff Baird's Buckeye Comedies." These were the buffoons who with their coarse pantomime, their heavy horse-play, did so much to debase a great art. There, even at his side, was the arch offender, none other than Jeff Baird himself, the man whose regrettable sense of so-called humour led him to make these low appeals to the witless. And even as he looked the cross-eyed ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... and Co., Undertakers; Play, Pantomime, Opera, Farce,—by the Makers! We scorn, like our brethren, our fortunes to owe To Shakespeare and Southern, to Otway and Rowe. Though our judgment may err, yet our justice is shewn, For we promise to mangle no works but our own. And moreover on this you may firmly rely, If we can't make you laugh, ...
— Sganarelle - or The Self-Deceived Husband • Moliere
... that I would not. Then we went through a very grim little pantomime. Proceeding to the centre of the arena-like space, I lifted the gun, and appeared to dash out Hans' brains with its butt. He fell upon his back, kicked about a little, and lay still. This finished ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... did not move in time to the strains of the cithara. Her son—a decrepit abortion, of no age and no sex—ill-treated the child, on whom he vented the hate he had for all womankind. Like the dancing-girls whose grace he affected, he knew, and taught Thais, the art of pantomime, and how to mimic, by expression, gesture, and attitude, all human passions, and more especially the passions of love. He was a clever master, though he disliked his work; but he was jealous of his pupil, and as soon as he discovered that ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... of warriors, and the prisoner was compelled to show himself a trophy of victory and to sing songs for his captors. That evening the united bands kindled an enormous campfire and with the scalps of the dead flaunting from spear heads danced the scalp dance, reenacting in pantomime all the episodes of the massacre to the monotonous chant-chant, of a recitative relating the foray. At the next camping-ground, Radisson's hair was shaved in front and decorated on top with the war-crest of a brave. Having translated the white man into ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... have shown no more of the jockey than Cinderella's feet in the early part of the pantomime disclose of her ball attire, suddenly cast off the pea-jackets and bearskin wraps, and shawls and overcoats of winter, and shine forth in all the silken flutter of ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... fiercely; and banging down the bucket, she went through a pantomime, in which she took Dyke's hand and placed it upon the back of her woolly head, so that he might feel an enormous lump in one place, a cut in another; and then with wondrous activity went through a scene in which she appeared to have a struggle with some personage, and ended by getting ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... Latin word for finish, and here it is the last droll picture—a Zany laughing at his portrait in this comical book, which he seems vastly to enjoy. What a droll fellow, to read with his head where his heels should be, like the clown in the pantomime. Look at his staff, the cock and bells, with which he dances, making a jingling noise. A Zany is not an idiot, but often a funny clever fellow, paid to make people laugh. We all like a good laugh sometimes. Many years ago kings ...
— The Royal Picture Alphabet • Luke Limner
... somethin' back in the dhark, an 'twas a queer song. Ut made my hair lift on the back av my neck. Thin the doors av all the palanquins slid back, an' the women bundled out. I saw what I'll niver see again. 'Twas more glorious than thransformations at a pantomime, for they was in pink an' blue an' silver an' red an' grass green, wid di'monds an' im'ralds an' great red rubies all over thim. But that was the least part av the glory. O bhoys, they were more lovely than the like av any loveliness in hiven; ay, their little bare feet were betther than the white ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... waste of time and the neglect of better things. For instance, on the festival of Easter, foolish, ridiculous stories have been introduced into the sermon to arouse the drowsy. And at the Christmas services, the absurd pantomime of rocking a babe, and silly declamations in rhyme, have found vogue. Similarly the festivals commemorating the three holy kings, the passion of Christ, Dorothy and ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... fair inamorata, and employs ingenious subterfuges to gain a stolen interview. He tells his passion not in words, but with profound sighs and significant glances, as he passes her flower-decked balcony, while she, although perfectly understanding his pantomime, assumes the most profound innocence and even indifference. This fires the suitor's ardor; he bows sadly when passing her balcony, with his right hand pressed vehemently upon his left breast, where a youthful lover's heart is popularly supposed to be located. Finally, after a good deal of pretentious ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... ways out. For example, Richard Strauss. His so-called ballet, "Josefs Legend," produced in Paris just before the war, is an attempt to write an opera without singers. All of the music is in the orchestra; the folks on the stage merely go through a pointless pantomime; their main function is to entertain the eye with shifting colors. Thus, the romantic sentiments of Joseph are announced, not by some eye-rolling tenor, but by the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... gymnastic tricks upon the backs of galloping horses in an American circus could discharge the functions of a First Lord of the Treasury or a Justice in the High Court of Judicature, or that a pantaloon in a Christmas pantomime could think out the Principia of Sir Isaac Newton or the Novum Organum of Lord Bacon. The fact was, the author was a conspicuous, shining light of his generation; the associate of princes and ministers; who, from the commanding position of his exalted ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... nor ill-informed, who contended that such pageantry was ill-timed. They advanced against it all sorts of objections which would have been quite appropriate if the public had been bidden to witness some colossal farce or burlesque; some raree-show of tasteless oddities, or some untimely pantomime of fairy-lore. What was really intended, and was performed, at a great cost of toil and organizing skill, was the opposite of all this. All the best elements of a great and glorious ceremonial ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... characterized much of the frontier life. He feared, too, that O'Kimmon underrated the extent of the Cherokee's comprehension of the language of which, however, the Indians generally spoke only a few disconnected phrases. So practiced were the savages in all the arts of pantomime, in the interpretation of facial expression and the intonation of the voice, that L'Epine had known in his varied wanderings of instances of tribes in conference, each ignorant of the other's language, who nevertheless reached a definite and intricate mutual ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... was Jack's fame that a pantomime entertainment, called "Harlequin Jack Sheppard," was devised by one Thurmond, and brought out with great success at Drury Lane Theatre. All the scenes were painted from nature, including the public-house that the robber frequented in Claremarket, and the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... third act is heart-gripping in its silent force. The whole scene is a pantomime, taking place ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... child to his feet. The man shook his fist at the child; the child, terrified at last, ran to a tree near by, got upon the farther side of it and took a more serious view of the situation. And so the clumsy multitude dragged itself slowly and painfully along in hideous pantomime—moved forward down the slope like a swarm of great black beetles, with never a sound ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... trunks, dolls, etc. This secret is worth one hundred dollars; *The Beautiful Language of Flowers*, arranged in alphabetical order; *Morse Telegraph Alphabet*, complete; *The Improved* Game of *Forfeit*, for two or more. Will please the whole family; *Parlor Tableaux*; *Pantomime;* *Shadow Pantomime*; *Shadow Buff*; *The Clairvoyant*, how to become a medium. A pleasing game when well played; *Game of Fortune*, for ladies and gentlemen. Amuses old and young; *The Album Writer's Friend*, 275 select Autograph Album ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... saw only the passing tree branches black against the evening sky as she lay across Kut-le's breast. The pursuers had made no sound nor had Kut-le broken a single twig. The entire incident might have been a pantomime, with every actor ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... railway children to begin with. I don't suppose they had ever thought about railways except as a means of getting to Maskelyne and Cook's, the Pantomime, Zoological Gardens, and Madame Tussaud's. They were just ordinary suburban children, and they lived with their Father and Mother in an ordinary red-brick-fronted villa, with coloured glass in the front door, a tiled passage that was called a hall, a bath-room with hot and ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... later when the older girl turned from the greetings and messages in pantomime with her friends below, she saw Ellen's rough head bending over a paper. It was a needlessly untidy head. During the weeks of close confinement and enforced companionship, she had felt her dislike steadily growing. The girl was on her nerves. ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... voiceless secrecy. She was no longer a make-believe queen, but a royal ruler, beloved by her subjects, adored by her throne-mate. Then the glittering ball that followed!—the blazing lights, the splendid pantomime, the great shifting kaleidoscope of beauteous ladies and knightly men in gold and satin and coats of mail! And, above all, the maddening mystery of that king at her side whose glances were now melting with melancholy, now ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... his people were intelligent enough to comprehend the utility of these weapons at an emergency, and illustrated in expressive pantomime the powers they possessed against numbers of people armed only with spears and bows, by extending their arms with an imaginary gun and describing a clear circle. "Verily," said they, "the Wasungu are far wiser than ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... fighting-loving gentry spent much of their leisure there. Those confounded trowsers of theirs offered conveniences of stowage-room which they made rare use of. Nothing was too small, and few things too unwieldy, to ride in them; like the pockets of clown in a pantomime, they could accommodate a well-grown baby or a pound of sausages equally well. I have a firm conviction that they stuffed turkeys, geese, and fowls into them, and I positively know that my only respectable teapot travelled off ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... to be head of the river, and now we can't row for sour apples," Dennison chuckled, "the thing's a perfect pantomime." ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... a pantomime performance for the benefit of Harold, who, when the drill was over, felt himself competent to receive the Queen's guests at the head of the ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... making a graceful, undulating motion with his right hand, not unlike the wriggling movement made by a snake in crawling. Then he elevated both hands high above his head, clasped closely together; then, apparantly satisfied with this pantomime, he started at a rapid pace toward us. Jerry turned; and, seeing my looks ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... existence; one year there was a vegetable acid, which the next was shown to be the same as an acid known thirty years ago; to- day a man was celebrated for having discovered a new metal or a new alkali, and they flourished like the scenes in a new pantomime only to disappear. Then, the great object of the hundred triflers in the science appeared to be to destroy the reputation of the three or four great men whose labours were really useful, and had in them something of dignity. ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... speed. The legs assumed motion, and it danced off the stage. The arms of the chairs put forth hands, and pinched the spirit-rappers, who sprang up and ran off, pursued by their chairs. This piece of mechanical pantomime was a triumph of Lord Curryfin's art, and afforded him ample satisfaction for the failure of ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... his left hand, and slapped its open palm vehemently with his right—pantomime to indicate the exact whereabouts he had selected for the ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... children. Which is totally absurd. Adults have never yet invented any institution, festival or diversion specially for the benefit of children. The egoism of adults makes such an effort impossible, and the ingenuity and pliancy of children make it unnecessary. The pantomime, for example, which is now pre-eminently a diversion for children, was created by adults for the amusement of adults. Children have merely accepted it and appropriated it. Children, being helpless, ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... the wounds inflicted may be the keener and silver spoons, and knives and forks. Yea, my Christian brethren, carving knives and pitchforks right down on the top of their brown mistresses, who are thereby invariably bruised like the clown in the pantomime—at least as I am told he is, for I never go to such profane Places—oh, no!—bruised as flat as pancakes, and generally murdered outright on the spot. Last of all the landlord gets up, and kicks the miserable butler himself down after his mates, into the very heart of the living mass; and ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... lady exclaimed, getting nothing of this except the pantomime; that, however, was eloquent. She recalled the picture of David in her girlhood's Sunday-school book. "Are you defying the Man of Gath?" She broke into a delicious smile which seemed to flood the wrinkles of her face with the sunshine of ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... of the judge rose in violent objurgation, and all eyes were fixed upon him, the chauffeur crooked his leg tightly about the brass pole, and, like the devil in the pantomime, sank softly and ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... singing, and the accompanying rhythmical gestures, were so simple, that a single person was able to do at the same time ample justice to both. The Romans, however, it would seem, preferred separate excellence to harmonious unity. Hence arose, at an after period, their fondness for pantomime, of which the art was carried to the greatest perfection in the time of Augustus. Prom the names of the most celebrated of the performers, Pylades, Bathyllus, &c., it would appear that it was Greeks that practised this ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... France—one of Edison's licensees—makes use of no fewer than seven of these glass theatres. All of the larger producers of pictures in this country and abroad employ regular stock companies of actors, men and women selected especially for their skill in pantomime, although, as most observers have perhaps suspected, in the actual taking of the pictures the performers are required to carry on an animated and prepared dialogue with the same spirit and animation as on the regular ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... Chelsea, when his common sense, his reason, his true emotions, were defeated by an impulse now scarcely intelligible; he saw himself shot across Europe, like a parcel despatched by express; and all that fury and rush meaningless as buffoonery at a pantomime! Yet this was how the vast majority of men "fell in love"—if ever they did so at all. This was the prelude to marriages innumerable, marriages destined to be dull as ditchwater or sour as verjuice. In love, forsooth! Rosamund at all ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... itself, if we except Mr. Marcus Clarke's 'His Natural Life.' After Mr. Clarke come Mr. Garnet Walsh, Mr. Grosvenor Bunster, and one or two prophets in their own neighbourhood, pleasant writers of Christmas stories, clever dramatizers of novels and pantomime-writers, but none of them with the least claim to a ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... great inventors he had stumbled upon the idea by chance one morning when his watch happened to be wrong; but he had developed the inspiration with consummate art and skill. It became his diversion, by means of the pantomime that had so successfully deceived me—by dramatically shooting out his wrist, consulting his watch, instantly stepping out and presently breaking into a run—to induce any gentleman behind him who had reached an age when the fear of missing trains has ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... most of the senators. They knew that they were no other than candle-snuffers, revolutionary scene-shifters, second and third mob, prompters, clerks, executioners, who stand with their axe on their shoulders by the wheel, grinners in the pantomime, murderers in tragedies, who make ugly faces under black wigs,—in short, the very scum and refuse of the theatre; and it was of course that the contrast of the vileness of the actors with the pomp of their habits naturally excited ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... arrived, tackle over shoulder, intent upon playing hookey at afternoon session, and disgusted that Monty was so little excited by their grimacing pantomime, as they demonstrated how they would escape to the woods and invited his company. Then they tried ridicule, calling "girl-boy, girl-boy," as loudly as they dared, with Katharine's scornful glances upon them. Monty grew fiery red and tossed his blond head as if shaking an obnoxious ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... piece was the last new grand comic Christmas pantomime, in the first scene of which, it pained me to suspect that I detected Mr. Wopsle with red worsted legs under a highly magnified phosphoric countenance and a shock of red curtain-fringe for his hair, engaged in the manufacture ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... villas, which have sprung up under the magic influence of M. Lenoir, under the white towers and gables of the old German town. The Prince of Trente et Quarante has quite overcome the old serene sovereign of Noirbourg, whom one cannot help fancying a prince like a prince in a Christmas pantomime—a burlesque prince with twopence-halfpenny for a revenue, jolly and irascible, a prime-minister-kicking prince, fed upon fabulous plum-puddings and enormous pasteboard joints, by cooks and valets with large heads which never alter their grin. Not that this portrait is from the life. Perhaps he ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... preferred his bed to his breakfast, and she sat down alone. In the midst of her meal, however, she heard Solomon scratching at the door. No sooner had he entered—dripping with rain—than he began the same pantomime of entreaty as that of yesterday when he tried to get somebody to follow him. Now, perhaps his ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell |
