"Drone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Birrell who said, "George Henry Lewes was the busy drone to a queen bee." It probably is well that Mr. Spencer and Miss Evans did not marry—they were too much alike—they might have gotten into ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... this habit of constant smoking that makes the Madrilenos the thirstiest people in the world; so that, alternating with the cry of "Fire, lord-lings! Matches, chevaliers!" you hear continually the drone so tempting to parched throats, "Water! who wants water? freezing water! colder than snow!" This is the daily song of the Gallician who marches along in his irrigating mission, with his brown blouse, his short breeches, and pointed hat, ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... craze creed tribe drone bean shape steep brine stone bead state sleek spire probe beam crape fleet bride shore lean fume smite blame clear mope spume spite flame drear mold fluke quite slate blear tore flume whine spade spear robe dure spine ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... woman there was, who dwelt In an old gray collage all alone— She turned her wheel the live long day— There was music, I ween, in its solemn drone. As she twisted the flax, the threads of thought Kept twisting too, dark, mystic threads— And the tales she told were legends old, Quaint fancies, ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... doesn't know of. Many a time has he helped various unsteady gentlemen up the steps of their houses and stowed them carefully and noiselessly away inside, only to begin his rounds again, stopping at every corner to drone out his "All's we-l-l!" a welcome cry, no doubt, to the stowaways, but a totally unnecessary piece of information to the inhabitants, nothing worse than a tippler's tumble having happened in the forty years of the ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... more upon the ground, panting like a fish; and I saw rising in his face the same dusky flush that had mantled on my father's. 'I feel ill,' he gasped, 'horribly ill; the swamp turns around me; the drone of these carrion flies confounds me. Have you ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... The squirrels were always friendly, and gave them nuts out of their own hoards; but the bees were selfish and rude, justifying themselves on the ground that Tangle and Mossy were not subjects of their queen, and charity must begin at home, though indeed they had not one drone in their poorhouse at the time. Even the blinking moles would fetch them an earth-nut or a truffle now and then, talking as if their mouths, as well as their eyes and ears, were full of cotton wool, or their own velvety fur. By the time they got out of the forest ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... us in England, such as roses, look rather pale and washed-out here in contrast with the flaming beauty of richest mauve and brightest orange worn by those which are at home in a hot country. As the sun gets strong we hear the drone of a swarm of great creatures like prodigious wasps with legs like stilts, which fly around the sweet-scented blooms. In ancient inscriptions this wasp, or hornet, was used as the sign of Northern or Lower Egypt. Across the flower-beds run miniature canals of stone, by ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... learn. Substantial two-and three-storied buildings of square-hewn logs lay grouped in a sort of Arts and Crafts village around a clean-clipped campus. The Stagbone College property stretched twenty acres square at the foot of a hill. The drone of its own saw-mill came across the valley. In a book-lined library, wainscoted in natural woods of three colors, the original fanatic often sat reflecting pleasurably on his folly. Higher up the hillside stood a small, but model, hospital, with a modern operating ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... The drone of bees and the carol of birds are naturally an incessant accompaniment to my toil—at least, in these spring and summer months. The tall, straight flue of the chimney, like the deep diapason of an organ, is softly murmurous with the flurry ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... festivals, while art went hand in hand with luxury. It seemed as though Bacchus and Pallas and Priapus would be reinstated in their old realm, and yet Rome had not ceased to call herself Christian. The hoarse rhetoric of friars in the Coliseum, and the drone of pifferari from the Ara Coeli, mingled with the Latin declamations of the Capitol and the twang of lute-strings in the Vatican. Meanwhile, amid crowds of Cardinals in hunting-dress, dances of half-naked girls, and masques of Carnival Bacchantes, moved pilgrims ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... a Drone-fly is nothing almost but eyes. 2. Those are of two magnitudes. 3. They are Hemispheres, and very reflective and smooth. 4. Some directed towards every quarter. 5. How the fly cleanses them. 6. ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... in the corner of the room, and my eyes gradually closed in sleep, catching, till they were finally sealed up, every now and then, twinklings of bare legs and well-turned ankles, mingled with the clatter of heavy brogues, and the drone of a bagpipe that had now superseded the squeak of the fife, and ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... There was nothing, absolutely nothing. I looked through the pile twice. A family reunion and they had not notified me! I had become as detached as all that! I glanced at Esther again. She was scratching away like mad. I heard the drone of a hurdy-gurdy outside. I would not stay here. The thought of a holiday in Irving Place became suddenly unendurable. I must escape it somehow. There was a train north an hour later. My ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... drone of honey-laden bees, The poppied breath of gardens blooming fair, The scent of elder blossoms, sweet and rare, Come stealing in on balmy southern breeze; And dying lays, whose long lost melodies Still haunt old storied ruins everywhere, Are dimly floating through ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... beginning a preparatory drone for another dance, but SHEAMUS brings him a drink and he stops. A man has come and holds out his hand to OONA, as if to lead her out, but she ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... and the shape of the earth was visible at the bottom of the air, enormous, dark, and solid, rising into the tapering mass of the mountain, and pricked here and there on the slopes by the tiny lights of villas. The driving air, the drone of the trees, and the flashing light which now and again spread a broad illumination over the earth filled Mrs. Flushing with exultation. Her breasts ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... he shot in air, Crept under the leaf, and hid her there; The katy-did forgot its lay, The prowling gnat fled fast away, The fell mosqueto checked his drone And folded his wings till the Fay was gone, And the wily beetle dropped his head, And fell on the ground as if he were dead; They crouched them close in the darksome shade, They quaked all o'er with awe and fear, For they had felt the blue-bent blade, And writhed at the prick of the elfin spear; ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... rocket space ship, the second one to be flown and that, with the exception of the ill-fated Hadley, farther from the earth than any man had been before. There was no sensation of movement in that hermetically sealed flyer, and, after the first few moments, the steady drone of the rocket motor failed to register on my senses. I was surprised to see that there was no trail ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... his age, the only point on which he could do so: saying constantly, "that wars were the province of young men, and that with the body the mind also flourishes and withers; that from having been a most vigorous warrior he was become a drone; and that he who, on coming up, had been wont to carry off camps and cities at the first onset, now consumed the time inactive within the trenches. What accession to his own strength, or diminution of that of the enemy, ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... provide himself with an axe and a prayer-book, and while he kept one eye on the whirring, humming wheels he kept the other on the good book, which he read by the flickering light of a candle set on a table. So the hours at first passed quietly with nothing to disturb him but the monotonous drone and click of the machinery. But on the stroke of twelve, as he was still reading with the axe lying on the table within reach, the door opened and in came two grey cats mewing, an old one and a young one. They sat down opposite him, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... where night still lingers, they trace vague white rays. Soon, when the sun shall have risen, these rays will lengthen and become beautifully golden. The cocks and the cicalas make themselves heard, and now Madame Prune will begin her mystic drone. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... bride had fallen sick on the voyage. He perceived the teeming harbor clogged with junks and house-boats, the muddy river, an artery out of the heart of darkness, the fantastic, colored shore-lines, the vast, dull drone of heathendom stirring in his ears, the temple gongs calling blindly to the blind, the alluring and incomprehensible accents of the boatmen's tongue which he was to have made his own and lightened with the fierce sweet name of the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... could spare; we could watch without weeping A Tutor's extinction, a Dean's disappearance. And Professors who drone while their pupils are sleeping, Though they went at a loss, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... virtue could charm him, no vice shock him. He had about him a natural good manner, which seemed to qualify him for the highest circles, and yet he was never out of place in the lowest. He had no principle, no regard for others, no self-respect, no desire to be other than a drone in a hive, if only he could, as a drone, get what honey was sufficient for him. Of honey, in his latter days, it may probably be presaged, that he ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... student can stand without becoming a drone. Criticism? Yes, but no quibbling, no nagging. Criticism is something more than fault-finding. The teacher exalts his profession, ennobles his art, and begets consideration for himself when he maintains the highest standards for ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... what I have is my own, if labour in getting, and care in augmenting, can make a right of property; and no drone shall feed on my honeycomb. Think on it well: what I have said is not without reflection, and what I resolve ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... old lady's lean fingers clinched into his arm; her eyes grew bright; her mouth opened and she stopped in the middle of her drone. Jerome grew rigid. And no wonder. From the middle of the room not ten feet away came the tone of a bell, a great silvery voluminous sound—and music. A church bell. Just one stroke, full toned, filling all the air till the whole room was choked with music. Then as suddenly it ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... words, now that he held the door open, he caught some sounds of mirth and the drone of ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... over and over; Swinburne's "Triumph of Time," and four lines of it rang in his memory afterward on warm nights when he saw the fireflies among dusky tree trunks and heard the low drone of many frogs. Then Eleanor seemed to come out of the night and stand by him, and he heard her throaty voice, with its tone of a fleecy-headed ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... night, and Trumet sidewalks were uneven and hard to navigate. But she stumbled on, up the main road to the Corners, down the "Turn-off," past the chapel of the Come-Outers, from the open window of which sounded the drone of a high, nasal voice. Josiah Badger was "testifying," and Keziah caught a fragment of the ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... come. The night was fine, but overcast by light clouds of grey mist, through which the moon pierced but very faintly. More than once her hopes were raised by the sound of hoofs, and dashed to the ground by the drone of wheels or by the appearance of a fat farmer jogging home. She asked more than one if they had seen a man on a brown horse and two children on ponies, but they only answered "no," and wished her civilly good night. In this way the rumour passed through the village that the ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... already she had told her son, relating all now with greater detail and circumstance. For some moments nothing was heard in that room but the steady drone of her unemotional voice. When she had finished, she yawned and settled herself to hear ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... earth is burdened by So many a fool, so many a drone, Whose thoughts and deeds are all awry— These trees of flesh, these ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... get anything to do, you mean, you lazy Cat! You are a good-for-nothing drone. Do you know what we do to our drones? We kill them; and that is all they are fit ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... said Rodolphe. "Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... revolutionary parades. Here scores of treasonable acts have been concocted, and daring robberies committed in the troublous times not long past. To-day it is peaceable enough; so quiet in the summer afternoons, here in the very heart of the busy city, that the drone of the busy humming-birds among the flowers comes soothingly upon the ear of the wakeful dreamer. Quiet now, but awaiting the next upheaval, for such, we are sorry to say, is pretty sure to come, sooner or later; the Roman Catholic Church party is not dead, but sleepeth. A strong, ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... thee, when the rays are now full, Do the oaks form an evergreen glade; While the drone of the locust overhead, seemed to lull The cattle that ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... didn't sleep much last night, and when I did I dreamed like fun. See here, you tell the people that I know, and it's all right, and I don't want them to talk about it or howl over me. That's all; now drone away, and I'll try to sleep. Wish I could for a ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... iridescent feather-wrought mantles, their heads dressed with white plumes, a staff of cane adorned with white feathers in the right hand, a green bough in the left, preceded by those curiously sonorous earthen drums, of which the drone blended with the notes of the religious song, Yo-he-wah-yah! Yo-he-wah-yah! they thrice led the glittering procession of the "holy dance" around and around ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... late at night, but this London moved with the decorum and caution of an undertaker. There was a silence, and yet there was no silence. There was a low drone, perhaps a humming contributed inevitably by closely-gathered thousands, and yet on second thoughts it was to me silence. I had perched my ears for the note of London, the sound made simply by the existence of five million people in one place. I had imagined ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... rabble of mountaineers of Aissawa were gone. Hooded Talebs, with prayer-mats under their arms, were picking their way in the gloom from the various mosques; and from these there came out into the streets the plash of water in the porticos and the low drone of singing ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... for me, Joy I've none in single horn. When the mingled trumpets sound,[a] This is sweetest from the drone! ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... air. The mist had lifted from the city below, and all the streets and open places were alive with noisy buyers and sellers, whose loud talking and disputing came up in a continuous hum to the palace on the hill, like the drone of a swarm of bees. The queen rose ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... people you knew, not a thousand miles away, couldn't go to the School of the Bees, and learn that line from Watts about Satan finding mischief for idle hands to do. And Joyce said yes, it was too bad for a fine fellow to get into trouble just because he was a drone, and had no ambition to make anything of himself; that if Alaka had gone to the School of the Bees he wouldn't have lost his eyes. And then you said that if somebody kept on he would at least lose his turquoises. ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... cannot but agree with me that ours was never the love of a man and woman whose hearts were attuned to one another, and sang in perfect unison. We really drifted into an engagement more because of propinquity than anything else. I am a drone—the product of society at its worst—and you are one of the workers, Donald. I feel quite sure that you will always gain your truest happiness in your work. Although I know how you love children (and I don't), I cannot think of you in the role of a married man, so I do not, deep ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... it or in me. But even the butterfly has its uses, and maybe I was meant to play a little part in your big life. I like to think it was so. Sometimes a bright day gets a little more interest from the drone of the locust or the glow of a butterfly's wings. I'm not sure that the locust's droning and the bright flutter of the butterfly's wings are not the way Nature has of fastening the soul to the meaning of it all. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... suggestion of such a bodiless assemblage as might have come together in the time of the Terror at midnight in the Place du Greve. The single note of strong colour—all the more effective because it was a very trumpet-blast above the drone of bees—was a brilliant splash of red running half-way around the mid-height: the crimson draperies in front of the three tiers set apart for the ministerial party and the Felibres. And for a roof over all was the dark star-set sky: whence the Great Bear gazed wonderingly down ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... arose a sound like the drone of some gigantic hive, or of the sea when the tide is making. Affonso Henriques recognized it for the ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... was the season of threshing, and all day long to the drowse of the air was added, near and afar, all-pervading through the stillness, the sleepy hum of the separator. Typical voice of the prairie was that busy drone, penetrating to the ears as the ubiquitous odor of the buffalo grass to the nostril, again bearing resemblance in that, once heard, memory would reproduce the sound ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... [Animal sounds.] Ululation. — N. cry &c. v.; crying &c. v.; bowwow, ululation, latration[obs3], belling; reboation[obs3]; wood-note; insect cry, fritiniancy|, drone; screech owl; cuckoo. wailing (lamentation) 839. V. cry, roar, bellow, blare, rebellow[obs3]; growl, snarl. [specific animal sounds] bark [dog, seal]; bow-wow, yelp [dog]; bay, bay at the moon [dog, wolf]; yap, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... they hae room to grumble! Hadst thou taen aff some drowsy bummle, [drone] Wha can do nought but fyke an' fumble, [fuss] 'Twad been nae plea; [grievance] But he was gleg as ony wumble, [lively, auger] ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... betting or training people, though." She put her hand on his arm warningly, as a high-pitched falsetto penetrated the drone of their half-whispered words, saying, "I tell you Dick knows all about this ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... long unweary time Cosmo lay and listened, an aerial Amphion, building castles in the air to its music, which was so monotonous that, like the drone of the bag-pipes, he could use it for accompaniment to any dream-time ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... was reading, Lucien came to a determination which compelled him to smooth down Monsieur Camusot. When Coquart's drone ceased, the poet started like a man who has slept through a noise to which his ears are accustomed, and who is roused by ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... Henry I. He appears to have been a scandalous pluralist, restless and greedy, continually seeking and obtaining additional preferment, and as often being forced to resign. He was not the man to prosecute such a work as was to be done at Burgh; "he lived even as a drone in a hive; as the drone eateth and draggeth forward to himself all that is brought near, even so did he."[8] It is likely that for eight years after the death of John de Sais nothing was done to advance the building. But the Prior of S. Neots, Martin de Bee, who was appointed to ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... take The chain in her own hands and walk behind. Indeed thy servants bore a troubled mind, O King, but how do else? So time went by. Meanwhile to make it seem she wrought some high Magic, she cried aloud: then came the long Drone of some strange and necromantic song, As though she toiled to cleanse that blood; and there Sat we, that long time, waiting. Till a fear O'ertook us, that the men might slip their chain And strike the priestess down and plunge amain For safety: yet the dread our eyes ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... cover the thorium world completely, expecting to have the unknown rocketeer fire at them. Then a fire bomb had been dropped as a further means of getting the asteroid to fire. But no rockets had been fired from the asteroid, so the pilot in control of the drone had sent it at low speed, a ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... Valley of the Mills; and in some of them lights were burning; and the drone of the mill-stones, where the women were still grinding, came out into the night like the humming of drowsy bees. As the women heard the pattering and bleating of the flock, they wondered who was passing so late. One of them, in a house where ...
— The Sad Shepherd • Henry Van Dyke
... masons building roofs of gold, The civil citizens kneading up the honey, The poor mechanic porters crowding in Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate, The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum, Delivering o'er to executors pale The lazy yawning drone. I this infer, That many things, having full reference To ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... to the king of the Matabele in the shape of four black oxen and one dance. A missionary has seen and described the deity discharging the latter part of his duty in front of the royal hut. For three mortal hours, without a break, to the banging of a tambourine, the click of castanettes, and the drone of a monotonous song, the swarthy god engaged in a frenzied dance, crouching on his hams like a tailor, sweating like a pig, and bounding about with an agility which testified to the strength and elasticity of his ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... to Clovelly?" he puffed at last, and they flung themselves down on the short, springy turf between the drone of the sea below and the light summer wind among the inland trees. They were looking into a combe half full of old, high furze in gay bloom that ran up to a fringe of brambles and a dense wood of mixed timber and hollies. It was as though ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... his riches would procure him in many other countries; while the less fortunate man, who makes his way and earns his living by hand and head work, may always reckon on the consideration of his fellow-citizens. On my return to Louisiana I had been thought nothing of. I was a drone in the hive—with money, but without skill or perseverance. My overseer was more looked up to than myself; but the recent change in the state of my plantation, attributed, however wrongly, to my presence, had caused a revolution in people's ideas; and I was now met on all sides with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... aftermath, not quite so rich or nourishing as the first growth; others, pointing at a kind of inferior bee, which receives the name of Foggie from its finding its nest among fog or moss; and others uncivilly insinuating that the Latin fucus, a drone, is the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... business, during one season, enables a man who left home a beggar to return with his fortune made! He marries, sets his wives to hoe the mealies and milk the cows, and thereafter takes life easy, except when he takes a fancy to hunt elephants, or to go to war for pastime. Ever after he is a drone in the world's beehive. Having no necessity he need not work, and possessing ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... of silk and linen from the rag-bag for bed-clothes; how they had hummed and whistled to themselves as they worked (she could hear them now!); and how the aromatic woodsy smell of the unfinished old room and the drone of the rain on the roof had been a part of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... as I have your assurance," said the mollified labor-leader, mumbling the conclusion of the sentence into his wine-glass. "But you know how it is! After I have worked the thing for years, I don't want to see a drone come in and ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and Ireland, wee reade not of past twoo or three places well fortified, as Sancto Domingo in Hispaniola, and Havana in Cuba. I may therefore conclude this matter with comparinge the Spaniardes unto a drone, or an emptie vessell, which when it is smitten upon yeldeth a greate and terrible sound, and that afarr of; but come nere and looke into them, there ys nothinge in them; or rather like unto the asse which wrapte himselfe in a lyons skynne, and marched farr of to strike ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... a space at his cigar in silence. The quiet drone of the engines came up from below, and the moonlight fell in a broad band of radiance on the foaming ribbon ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... the two circles, and letters of strange form, arrowy, lance-like, like leaning sheaves, and crouching baboons, and kicking jackasses, and cocks a-crow, and lutes slack-strung; and she knelt and mumbled over and over words of magic, like the drone of a bee to hear, and as a roll of water, nothing distinguishable. After that she sought for an unguent of a red colour, and smeared it on a part of the floor by the corner of the room, and wrote on it in silver fluid a word that was the word 'Eblis,' and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the northwestern territories by the sobriquet of Ben Buzz—extensively as to distances, if not as to people. By the voyageurs, and other French of that region, he was almost universally styled le Bourdon^ or the "Drone"; not, however, from his idleness or inactivity, but from the circumstances that he was notorious for laying his hands on the products of labor that proceeded from others. In a word, Ben Boden was a "bee-hunter," and as he was one ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... the shadows and the rising drone of night sounds and the whispering of the breeze which was all that was left of the wind, the man came riding cautiously up through a draw to the willow growth just below Sinkhole watering place. He tied his horse there ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... beastly sort, In sweate and labour hauing most chiefe comfort, On the holy day assoone as morne is past, When all men resteth while all the day doth last, They drinke, they banket, they reuell and they iest They leape, they daunce, despising ease and rest. If they once heare a bagpipe or a drone, Anone to the elme or oke they be gone. There vse they to daunce, to gambolde and to rage Such is the custome and vse of the village. When the ground resteth from rake, plough and wheles, Then moste they it trouble with ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... I see you to-morrow?" "I'll take your offer for those bonds." ... And I could see the interiors of innumerable offices and drawing-rooms.... But of course I could hear and see nothing really except the intent drone and quick gesturing of those completely absorbed young creatures in the dim radiance, on ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... much-wanted gentleman, and evidently a tobie-man with a wide range of activities. Out of mere vacancy of mind I walked near to read the fly-sheet again, and, by a curious chance, among the drone of words from the other room, the only one my quick ear could pick ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... open all around and the sweet breath of the opening roses stole in with the summer breeze, while the drone of bees and the pure notes of a song sparrow lulled ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... man had found her in the barren rocklands and taken her with the high hand of a lover. She, too, drifted away from the chilling courtroom with its judge and its petty officials.... And then all suddenly she knew that men were talking—and about her. She heard the drone of question and answer—the rambling statements of the stranger, Arizona, accusing her of strange things—of asking him to take her on rides in Courtrey's absence—of swinging with him nights in the hammock ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... machines drone with metallic docility under the flaxen head of the foreman poised like an ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... weeds. The air was hot and sticky and heavily charged with a shimmering white water vapour. There were a few sluggish clouds with sombre centres hanging about the valley to the southwest, and there was a drone and zip of flying creatures in swarms above the drying weeds and stubble. Coming to a large oak tree standing solitary in that wasting field, he threw himself face downward on the ground in its shadow, careless that the grass was scant, and that his bed was scratchy. For a moment he ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... tripped the tele-transport control and from the engine rooms came a drone of power. In Ranthoor Prison, great bands of force wrapped themselves around the vault, clutching it, enfolding it within a sphere of power. Back in the Invincible the engines screamed and the vault was ripped out of the solid steel ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... drone-fly (Eristalis tenax), force the air through the tiny air-passages in their sides, and as these passages are closed by little plates, the plates vibrate to and fro and make sound-waves. Again, what are those curious sounds you may hear sometimes if you rest your head ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... every Saturday, they met at the post office on week evenings, occasionally they saw each other for a moment after church on Sunday mornings. Mrs. Fletcher Fosdick could not imagine why her only child cared to attend that stuffy little country church and hear that prosy Kendall minister drone on and on. "I hope, my dear, that I am as punctilious in my religious duties as the average woman, but one Kendall sermon was sufficient for me, thank you. What you see in THAT church to please you, I ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... my saying what I wanted, roused her. It disturbed the Doctor too, for when I went back to replace the candle I had taken from the table, he was patting her head, in his fatherly way, and saying he was a merciless drone to let her tempt him into reading on; and he would have her go ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... great, pealing chords the modern piano is so fertile in. I count it as one of the most spontaneous gavottes of modern times, one that is buoyant with the afflation of the olden days. It carries a musette of which old Father Bach need not have felt ashamed,—one of the most ingenious examples of a drone-bass ever written. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... the byre now at home beyond the sea, and it is not strange faces he will be seein', but the lads and lassies of the Glen, and it is John McNeash who holds the drone under his arm and the chanter in his hands, and the salty tang of the sea comes up to him and the peat-smoke is in his nostrils, and the pipes skirl higher and higher as Tonald McKenzie dances the dance of his forbears in a strange land. They had seen Tonald dance before, but ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... different people to be of her party; and idly watched a white hen with yellow kid boots and a coral comb in her nicely groomed hair picking daintily about the green under the oak trees that shaded the street. She listened to the drone of the bees in the garden near by, the distant whetting of a scythe, the monotonous whang of a steam thresher not far away, the happy voices of children, and thought how empty a life in this village would be; almost as dreary and uninteresting as living in a desert—and then suddenly she caught ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... perception she had at that hour of the value and significance of the earthly lot. She lifted her head and listened to that; it seemed a comment. Then a harsh quarrelling of dogs—Christian dogs—arose in the distance and died away, and again there was night and silence. Suddenly the long singing drone of a steamer's signal came across the city from the river, once, twice, thrice; and presently the sparrows began their twittering in the bushes near the verandah, an unexpected unanimous bird talk that died as suddenly and as irrelevantly away. ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Doctor Churchill," she said, slowly, "until father and mother went away I had been the lazy one of the family, the good-for-nothing—the drone—and I've not yet learned to work in the quiet way my sister does, which accomplishes so much without any fuss. Now that she can get about again she does twice as much as I do, but she doesn't ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... a maddening wait. The Scientist's voice went on and on like the drone of an electric fan, interrupted only by an occasional murmur from Mother or Dad. For a while David sat in bed twisting the sheets in his hands; then he got up and paced the room in his bare feet. It seemed to him that ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... a Rubens with some cheap lithograph." These modern copies are the result of recent efforts to revive the use of this fascinating instrument. A barytone of a kindred nature was the viola di bordone or drone viol, so called because there was a suggestion of the buzzing of drone-flies, or humble bees, in the tones of its sympathetic strings, which often numbered as many as twenty-four. These violas recall ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... delivered in a whisper, shocked Dane into obeying it. Number One hold ... there were three divisions now and the stowage was—He became aware that for a small space of time he had escaped the net being woven by the beat of the drum, the drone of voices, the nodding of heads. He moistened his lips. So that was how it worked! He had heard Tau speak often enough about self-hypnotism under such conditions, but this was the first time the meaning of it had ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... she didn't know that some people called him by that name merely because he was seen in Pleasant Valley about the time Farmer Green harvested his crops. As for working in the fields, Daddy Longlegs knew no more about that than did that fat drone, Buster Bumblebee. And Farmer Green would have laughed heartily at the idea of either of ...
— The Tale of Daddy Longlegs - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... to the world like a bird to his nest, Now is the drone of his coming the roaring of hell, Now with a splutter and crash are the engines at ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... straight as the face of parties on the other hand was deformed. But being in the federal city, I became forcibly impressed with the fact, that your smallest man has the largest expectations, though he will not object to become the nation's drone. Having made this wonderful discovery, I took up my line of march for the National Hotel, a gorgeous palace where an uncouth million meet to revel in cheap luxury. So large was the house that a pilot to guide me through its thousand galleries to bed was an ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... of face, and dead, but pursuing me still! Ah, woe upon me, woe ineffable! He steals upon my track, a hound of hell— Where'er I stray, along the sands and brine, Weary and foodless, come his creeping eyne! And ah, the ghostly sound— The wax-stopped reed-flute's weird and drowsy drone! Alack my wandering woes, that round and round Lead me in many mazes, lost, foredone! O child of Cronos! for what deed of wrong Am I enthralled by thee in penance long? Why by the stinging bruise, the thing of fear, Dost thou torment me, heart and brain? ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... my troth," said the fool, thinking. "Since Eve fell into sin, women's counsel is often the best. You, Nunkey, shall be turned into a butterfly, and not into a drone, and grace the flowers as ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... back laughing, and squatted down on the floor, concealed by the window-seat. The sound of the pipes increased till their rough drone seemed to be in the room, bidding a rustic defiance to its whiteness and its silence. Still squatting on the floor, ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... fair copy of his prologue; Moliere contributed fifty fresh verses, with which his visit to Percerin had inspired him; Loret, an article on the marvelous fetes he predicted; and Aramis, laden with his booty like the king of the bees, that great black drone, decked with purple and gold, re-entered his apartment, silent and busy. But before departing, "Remember, gentlemen," said he, "we leave ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the Sky Queen soared toward the ocean. Soon they came in sight of Fearing Island rocket base, a few miles off the coast. Once a barren stretch of sand dunes and scrub-grass, the island was now the Swifts' top-secret rocket laboratory, guarded by drone planes and radar. It served as the supply base for Tom's space station and as the launching area for all space flights. Seacopters and jetmarines were also ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... hateful, but still more tiresome, because she favoured him, and was always thrusting him upon me, and sounding his praises in my ears—Mr. Boarham by name, Bore'em, as I prefer spelling it, for a terrible bore he was: I shudder still at the remembrance of his voice—drone, drone, drone, in my ear—while he sat beside me, prosing away by the half-hour together, and beguiling himself with the notion that he was improving my mind by useful information, or impressing his dogmas upon me and reforming my errors of judgment, or perhaps that he was talking down to my ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... over those evenings graced by your presence, and lit by a cheerful fire, time and again. Do not think me insincere when I assure you they were the most delightful ones I ever passed. If you find time to write a line to one who is now a worker in the hive instead of a drone, it will be gratefully received ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... would be looking for him. Johnny winced from the thought of Mary V, out on the porch, watching the sky toward Tucson for the black speck that would be his airplane; listening for the high, strident drone that would herald his coming. She would cry ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... cheered myself by the air. "Never a roar of the drone or a sob of the chanter but's ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... him buy, for a song, Holt Hangars, whose forty-acre lawn, as every one knows, sweeps down in velvet to the quadruple tracks of the Great Buchonian Railway. Their trains flew by almost continuously, with a bee-like drone in the day and a flutter of strong wings at night. The son of Merton Sargent had good right to be interested in them. He owned controlling interests in several thousand miles of track,—not permanent way,—built ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... hazel-bushes, and was already inundated with gloom; I advanced with difficulty. My gig jolted over the firm roots of the centenarian oaks and lindens, which incessantly intersected the long, deep ruts—the traces of cart-wheels; my horse began to stumble. A strong wind suddenly began to drone up above, the trees grew turbulent, big drops of rain clattered sharply, and splashed on the leaves, the lightning and thunder burst forth, the rain poured in torrents. I drove at a foot-pace, and was speedily compelled to halt; my horse stuck fast. ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... the whole lot of them! Won't we have some fun now! Kate, run down stairs, and bring me up a cork; and I want a long white sheet and a mop. Now haste thee, do! for I would fain cause Father Jordan to skrike out at me, and I have scarce time to get my work done ere the old drone shall come buzzing up this gait. Be sharp, maid! and I'll do thee a good turn ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... and the daughter of the Earl of Anjou were divorced on the plea of consanguinity. Thus wretchedly was the abbacy given away, betwixt Christmas and Candlemas, at London; and so he went with the King to Winchester, and thence he came to Peterborough, and there he dwelt (157) right so as a drone doth in a hive. For as the drone fretteth and draggeth fromward all that the bees drag toward [the hive], so did he.—All that he might take, within and without, of learned and lewd, so sent he over sea; and no good did there—no good left there. Think no man unworthily that we say not the truth; ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... became known that the artillery was firing gas shells on the enemy batteries, so that at zero the enemy would not be able to work their guns. The drone of the gas shells passing overhead, and the knowledge of this device on the part of the British artillery, was very reassuring to ...
— The Story of the "9th King's" in France • Enos Herbert Glynne Roberts
... reproduction to the non-sexual formation of germ-cells (which most resembles it). It has been demonstrated to occur in many cases among insects, especially by Seebold's excellent investigations. Among the common bees, a male individual (a drone) arises out of the eggs of the queen, if the eggs have not been fructified; a female (a queen or working bee), if the ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... tasselled, till each heather stalk Is delicately fringed. The sycamores, Through all their mystical entanglement Of boughs, are draped with silver. All the green Of sweet leaves playing with the subtle air In dainty murmuring; the obstinate drone Of limber bees that in the monk's-hood bells House diligent; the imperishable glow Of summer sunshine never more confessed The harmony of nature, the divine, Diffusive spirit of the beautiful. Out in ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... that the men would concern themselves about details that, in Anglo-Saxon countries at least, have for centuries been firmly relegated to the partner of the second part. How many American women drive their husbands to the club by their incessant drone about the iniquities of servants and ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... all, is Miss Hugonin, utilising the vast power of money—which I am credibly informed is a very good thing to have, though I cannot pretend to speak from experience—and casting whole bakeryfuls of bread upon the waters of charity. And here am I, the idle singer of an empty day—a mere drone in this hive of philanthropic bees! Dear, dear," said Mr. Kennaston, enviously, "what a thing it is to be practical!" And he laughed toward Margaret, in ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... The humble-bees' drone again became ascendant—a sudden fear seized him. She was GOING; he should never see her! While he had stood there a dolt and sluggard, she had satisfied her curiosity and stolen away. With a sudden yielding to impulse, he darted quickly in the direction where he had heard ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... what I'll do after college! I'll get my hands on one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful. Be an inspiration. I suppose I'd better become a teacher then, but—I won't be that kind of a teacher. I won't drone. Why should they have all the garden suburbs on Long Island? Nobody has done anything with the ugly towns here in the Northwest except hold revivals and build libraries to contain the Elsie books. I'll make 'em put in a village ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... the Tropics, and I sincerely pitied the man who all these stifling hours had been toiling on the screes of Sgurr Dearg. By-and-by we sat down on a bank of heather, and idly watched the trough swimming at our feet. The clatter of the pony's hoofs grew fainter, the drone of bees had gone, even the midges seemed to have forgotten their calling. No place on earth can be so deathly still as a deer-forest early in the season before the stags have begun roaring, for there ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... dining-room—helping to lay the cloth, as she had been rather clumsy, too, and been sent away, and her young man was as nice as mine; and we four had a superb time, as happy as children, but Tom was nothing but a drone, for he sat with Kitty in a window seat behind some curtains, and did not do ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... prat'st thou to thyself, and answer'st not? Dromio, thou drone, thou snail, thou slug, ...
— The Comedy of Errors • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... at its core. Well-pleased the wanderer landed on this shore, Beholding all its pleasantness, how sweet And soft, to the tired soul, to the tired feet. And so he sat him down beneath the boughs, And there a low wind seemed to drone and drowse Among the leaves as it were gone astray And like to faint forwearied by the way; Till the persistence of the sound begat An heaviness within him as he sat: So when Sleep chanced to come that way, he found A captive not unwilling to ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... saw a goods train winding out of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness, obstinately and laboriously. It passed slowly out of sight; but still he heard in his ears the laborious drone of the engine reiterating ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... and surrounded by four or five candles, burnt to the sockets; his chanter and bags were laid scientifically across his body, his mouth was wide open, and his nose made ample amends for the silence of his drone. Joe Kelly and a Mr. Peter Alley were fast asleep in their chairs, ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... from speaker to speaker, and waited, wide open and fixed, until the last word was spoken. He listened fascinated and enthralled. And so vividly did the changes of expression shoot and quiver across his face, that it seemed to Sutch the lad must actually hear the drone of bullets in the air, actually resist the stunning shock of a charge, actually ride down in the thick of a squadron to where guns screeched out a tongue of flame from a fog. Once a major of artillery spoke of the suspense of the hours between the parading ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... found, as is not utterly uncommon, quite a few maids and matrons among the households of the absent soldiery quite willing to be consoled and comforted. There were bright lights, therefore, further along the edge of the steep, beyond those of the hospital, and the squeak of fiddle and drone of 'cello, mingled with the plaintive piping of the flute, were heard at intervals through the silence of the wintry night. No tramp of sentry broke the hush about the little rift between the heights—the major holding that none was necessary where there ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... away toward the horizon in dreamy violet, and the retreating sun leaves limber shafts of orange light, like Parthian arrows, among the green branches of the elms, what sounds can charm the ear like the soft chirrup of the cricket, the homely drone of the hive-seeking bee, and the cool rustle of the breeze through the tops of the spring-sodden water grasses? How fondly the mind blends the evening colors and the incipient voices of the night! ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to say horrible, as he recalled one of his pet abominations, a dirty, kilted and plaided Scotchman, who made night hideous about the Bloomsbury squares with his chanter and drone. ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... romantic person. In the actuality she felt as frigid as if his marble forehead was chilling her, and what she remembered most acutely was his fishlike gasping. Then, too, the contradictoriness of his social attitude, his desire to make her a rich drone, his shame at his mother, his reclusive shyness—all the weaknesses of the man—came to obscure her sense of his literary idealism, if not, indeed, to reveal it as a mere coquetry with fine ideas and coarse clothes. And then for a moment the humour of being Mrs. Maper's daughter-in-law ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... she thought how different was this bridal tour from what she had anticipated. She had fully expected to pass by daylight through the Empire State, and she had thought with how much delight her eye would rest upon the grassy meadows, the fertile plains, the winding Mohawk, the drone-like boats on the canal, the beautiful Cayuga, and the silvery water so famed in song; but, in contrast to all this, she was shut up in a dingy car, whose one dim lamp sent forth a sickly ray and sicklier smell, while without all was gloomy, dark, and drear. No wonder, then, that when toward ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... wild birds in a cloud fly up From their sweet feeding in the fruit; The droning of the bees and flies Rises gradual as a lute; Is it for fear the birds are flown, And shrills the insect-drone? ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... this universal hurry, no man ought to be so little influenced by example, or so void of honest emulation, as to stand a lazy spectator of incessant labour; or please himself with the mean happiness of a drone, while the active swarms are buzzing about him: no man is without some quality, by the due application of which he might deserve well of the world; and whoever he be that has but little in his power, should be in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... The drone of the engine having died away down the avenue, I presently found myself alone, but as I crossed the hall in the direction of the library, intending to walk out upon the southern lawns, I saw Val Beverley coming toward me from Madame de ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... More sweet than Nature's, when the drone Of bees is sweetest, and more deep Than when the rivers overleap The shuddering pines, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... went down the line once more. The pistolry of the wagon whips made answer, the drone of the drivers rose as the sore-necked oxen bowed their heads again, with less strength even for ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough |
