"Spindle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... came home before his wife expected him. Supper was not ready, and in her haste to rise to prepare it, she overturned the wheel when it was still in motion. Hargreaves, entering at that moment, noticed that the spindle, usually horizontal, was now revolving in an upright position. This gave him the idea, and a short time afterwards he invented a machine with which one person could spin several threads at once (at first eight). From it has been developed the complicated ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Wagner's first love, nor even his first wife. For in November, 1836, he had married Wilhelmina Planer, the leading actress of the theatre in Magdeburg where he was musical director of opera. Her father was a spindle-maker. It is said that her desire to earn money for the household, rather than the impetus of a well-defined histrionic gift, led her to go on the stage; but, once on the stage, she discovered that she had unquestionable ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... the waving tree-tops of the north, He saw the comrades to their tryst go forth. Each word true as their own sharp weapons seemed, As much for friendship as for war their worth. Then thought he of his wife; he saw her sit In all the glory of her golden hair Before their hut, whirling the spindle there Send forth her thoughts across the leagues to flit And reach him here. In that same woodland shrine A merry boy was carving his first spear, His blue eyes flashing boldly in scorn of fear, As though he said—"A sword—the world is mine!" Then swift ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... constructed variously. A hand mill is the most simple. A large upright post is placed on a gudgeon, with shafts extending horizontally 15 or 20 feet. Around the ends of these is a band of raw hide twisted, which passes around the trundle head and turns the spindle and communicates motion to the stone. A cog mill is formed by constructing a rim with cogs upon the shafts, and a trundle head to correspond. Each person furnishes his own horses to turn the mill, performs his own ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... mahogany with corresponding grooves, X X X X, &c. to those on the floor-board, at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, and 15-2/8 holes for the top bolt, r, of the observation-frame, Z, to fix into. t, t, t, the screw nuts at the backs of the bee-frames, &c., for the screw at the end of the spindle, S, to work into, and thus hold and draw out of the grooves the bee-frames; w, the bee-frame containing comb and bees, drawn partly into the ...
— A Description of the Bar-and-Frame-Hive • W. Augustus Munn
... these words in hewing the handle of his ax; anciently my mother taught me these words as she turned her spindle. In that time I was only a child, a little child at the breast,—a useless little being creeping upon the floor at the feet of its nurse, its cheek bedaubed with milk. And there are other words which ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... time, in consequence of the Dutch-Spanish war, and the multitude of Protestant refugees, it was getting filled with ingenious industries, and rising to be what it still is, the busiest quarter of Germany. A country lowing with kine; the hum of the flax-spindle heard in its cottages in those old days—"much of the linen called Hollands is made in Juelich, and only bleached, stamped, and sold by the Dutch," says Buesching. A country in our days which is shrouded at short intervals with the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... made for taking up the slack of this belt by mounting the spindle of the outer coned drum in bearings adjustable along a circular path struck from the axis of the lower feed roller as a center, thus insuring a uniform engagement between the teeth of the small pinion and those of the spur ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... Jan Koekebakken, prisoner, be conducted by the executioner from the Chancery to Brol-bridge, and that he be put into the pillory there. He shall remain standing there for two hours with a spindle under each arm, and with the letter in which he pledged faith to the said Aucke Sijbrant hanging from his neck. He shall remain for ever within the town of Leeuwarden, under penalty of death if ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... lips to wish long life, when, just at that moment, the thirteenth fairy, who had not been invited, burst into the room. She pushed the good fairy aside and, before anyone could stop her, she cried out in a loud angry voice, "The princess shall prick her finger with a spindle, on her fifteenth birthday, and shall die!" In a moment all was excitement. The jealous old fairy rushed from the palace, but the people dashed after her. "Drive the wicked witch from the kingdom! Burn every spindle in ...
— A Kindergarten Story Book • Jane L. Hoxie
... sings: "O joy, O joy, For the humming street, and the child with its toy! 90 For the priest, and the bell, and the holy well; For the wheel where I spun, And the blessed light of the sun deg.!" deg.93 And so she sings her fill, Singing most joyfully, 95 Till the spindle drops from her hand, And the whizzing wheel stands still. She steals to the window, and looks at the sand, And over the sand at the sea; And her eyes are set in a stare; 100 And anon there breaks a sigh, And anon there drops a tear, From a sorrow-clouded eye, And a heart ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... and was fit to take none. There were not wanting writers and thinkers who saw clearly the end to which the enervation of the female was tending, and who were not sparing in their denunciations. "Time was," cries one Roman writer of that age, "when the matron turned the spindle with the hand and kept at the same time the pot in her eye that the pottage might not be singed, but now," he adds bitterly, "when the wife, loaded with jewels, reposes among pillows, or seeks the dissipation ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... beneath the eaves Of his old cottage, as it chanced that day, Employ'd in winter's work. Upon the stone His Wife sate near him, teasing matted wool, While, from the twin cards tooth'd with glittering wire, He fed the spindle of his youngest child, Who turn'd her large round wheel in the open air With back and forward steps. Towards the field In which the parish chapel stood alone, Girt round with a bare ring of mossy wall, While half an hour went by, the Priest had sent Many a long look of wonder, and at last, ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... rent his ear; a young girl, hiding the point of a spindle in her sleeve, split his cheek; they tore handfuls of hair from him and strips of flesh; others smeared his face with sponges steeped in filth and fastened upon sticks. A stream of blood started from the right side of his neck, frenzy ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... shadows of Blythe's Abyss and wind beneath a great box-shaped formation of red sandstone set on a spindle rock and balancing there in dizzy space like Mohammed's coffin; and then, at the end of a mile-long jog along a natural terrace stretching itself midway between Heaven and the other place, you come to the residence of Shorty, the official hermit ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... home in the Hall of Mists, Freya (or Frigga), wife of Odin the All Father, sat with her golden distaff spinning the clouds. Orion's Belt was known as "Frigga's spindle" by the Norsemen, and the men on the earth, as they watched the great cumulous masses of snowy-white, golden or silver edged, the fleecy cloudlets of grey, soft as the feathers on the breast of a dove, ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... beautiful also in the doing. To watch her, as she took the wool in its rude state and formed it into rolls, or separated it with her fingers and carded it till it looked as light and soft as a cloud, or twirled the spindle with skilful touch, or wove the web, or, after it was woven, adorned it with her needle, one would have said that Minerva herself had taught her. But this she denied, and could not bear to be thought a pupil even of a goddess. "Let Minerva try her skill with mine," said ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... and grandeur. Following the picture card was played the ace of commercial importance. Fourteen thousand horsepower would this dam furnish. Cotton mills, factories, and manufacturing plants would rise up as the green corn after a shower. The spindle and the flywheel and turbine would sing the shrewd glory of Okochee. Along the picturesque heights above the lake would rise in beauty the costly villas and the splendid summer residences of capital. The naphtha launch of the millionaire would ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... he came to himself. She was sitting by the window preparing sheep's-wool for her spindle. She bent over her task, using the last of the light, which fell upon her head. She did not know that he was conscious, or had been watching her, ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... usually deem'd an Actor of the first Rank, yet the Characters allotted him were such, that none besides, then, or since, ever topp'd; for his Figure, which was diminutive and mean, (being Round-shoulder'd, Meagre-fac'd, Spindle-shank'd, Splay-footed, with a sour Countenance and long lean Arms) render'd him a proper Person to discharge Jago, Foresight and Ma'lignij, in the Villain.—This Person acted strongly with his Face,—and (as King Charles said) was the best ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... specially chosen for her, and which she impressed upon her she must think of as appropriated to her—was exactly what she liked. The chintz hangings—pale pink rosebuds on a white ground—the quaint spindle-legged dressing-tables and chairs, the comfortably spacious but undecorated wardrobe of dark old mahogany, the three-cornered bookcases fitted in to the angles of the walls with their lozenge-paned glass doors—all was just as ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... its rise, shall be so in its fall.[8] I saw Bellineoin Berti[9] go girt with leather and bone,[10] and his dame come from her mirror without a painted face. And I saw them of the Nerli, and them of the Vecchio,[11] contented with the uncovered skin,[12] and their dames with the spindle and the distaff. O fortunate women! Every one was sure of her burial place;[13] and as yet no one was deserted in her bed for France.[14] One over the cradle kept her careful watch, and, comforting, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... before the site had been marked by a spindle bearing an iron cage and fastened to a huge boulder known as Shark Ledge Rock, and covered at low water. The unloading of various sloops and schooners under his orders had enlarged this submerged rock ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of the cafe was a small terrace bordered on the right and left by spindle-trees planted in boxes, which were connected by a paling. Behind the shrubs, sitting on a bank but stooping forward so that they could see Dalbreque through the ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... She held the spindle as she sat, Errina with the thick-coiled mat Of raven hair and deepest agate eyes, Gazing with a sad surprise At surging visions of her destiny— To spin the byssus drearily In insect-labor, while the throng Of gods and men wrought deeds that poets ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... fairy's turn coming next, her head shaking more with spite than with age, she said that the Princess should pierce her hand with a spindle and die of the wound. This terrible gift made the whole company ...
— The Tales of Mother Goose - As First Collected by Charles Perrault in 1696 • Charles Perrault
... French the Duke of Bedford sent for five thousand men from England, who came and settled themselves at Paris. One division of this army had a white standard, in the middle of which was depicted a distaff full of cotton; a half-filled spindle was hanging to the distaff; and the field, studded with empty spindles, bore this inscription: "Now, fair one, come!" Insult to Joan was accompanied by redoubled war against France. Joan, saddened and wearied by the position of things, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... they had small variegated shawls, made on hand looms, folded so as to make a pointed bonnet over the head and protect the neck and shoulders from sun and wind. Each woman was busily spinning with a hand spindle, but carried her baby and its gear and blankets in a hammock or sling attached to a tump-line that went over her head. These sling carry-alls were neatly woven of soft wool and decorated with attractive patterns. ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... practice of textile arts by many ancient nations is preserved to us by such implements of weaving as happened to be of enduring materials; spindle-whorls in clay and stone are perhaps the most common of these relics. These objects tell us definitely of the practice of the art, but give little insight into the character of the products. It is a notable fact that evidence ...
— Prehistoric Textile Art of Eastern United States • William Henry Holmes
... of inclination between the two ropes can be varied if required. A grooved pulley presses upon the trailing span at the moment before it reaches the circumference of the drum. It is mounted on a screwed spindle, which is depressed by a nut, and thus makes the wet rope grip the outside of the drum in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... Cedars was very different from that in the Craig cottage. It was pretty and comfortable, with lamps that diffused a cheerful, mellow glow over the lower half of the room and left the upper in pleasantly mysterious gloom. There was much old-fashioned furniture—such as the spindle-legged card table at which Miss Mullett and the Doctor were deeply absorbed in cribbage—but enough comfortable modern chairs had been provided to render martyrdom unnecessary. The four windows were hung with bright creton and muslin, ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... weaving, in and out, in and out, she was a twentieth century version of any one of the Fates, with the Klinger darner and mender substituted for distaff and spindle. There was something almost humanly intelligent in the workings of Martha's machine. Under its glittering needle she would shove a sock whose heel bore a great, jagged, gaping wound. Your home darner, ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... seat. I meant she should be courteous, facile, sweet, Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride: I meant each softest virtue there should meet, Fit in that softer bosom to reside. Only a learned and a manly soul I purposed her, that should, with even powers, The rock, the spindle, and the shears, control, Of Destiny, and spin her own free hours. Such when I meant to feign, and wished to see, My Muse bade, BEDFORD ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... was humming a quick measure and Dorothy trod lightly back and forth, the wheel-pin in one hand, the other holding the tense, lengthening thread, which the spindle ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... years back. Its furniture, for the most part, was of the Restoration, of simple and massive oak blackened by age, which I ever fancied better than the Frenchy baubles of tables and chairs with spindle legs, and cabinets of glass and gold lacquer which were then making their way into the fine mansions of our town. The house was full of twists and turns, and steps up and down, and nooks and passages and queer hiding-places which we children knew, and in parts queer leaded windows ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... pavilion and the caffe. But we do not seek their company at dinner-time. Our way lies under yonder arch, and up the narrow alley into a paved court. Here are oleanders in pots, and plants of Japanese spindle-wood in tubs; and from the walls beneath the window hang cages of all sorts of birds—a talking parrot, a whistling blackbird, goldfinches, canaries, linnets. Athos, the fat dog, who goes to market daily in a barchetta with his master, snuffs around. "Where ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... could not keep the King quiet in any other way, it seems he made him sit for his picture. The studio was never without an unfinished portrait of the King. From eighteen to fifty-four he sat to Velasquez—and it is always that same tall, spindle-legged, impassive form and the dull, unspeaking face. There is no thought there, no aspiration, no hope too great for earth, no unrequited love, no dream unrealized. The King was incapable of love as he was of hate. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... by receiving only the general obsequiousness which most men give to the whole sex. In the man who contradicts and strives with her, she discovers a truer interest, a nobler respect. The empty-headed, spindle-shanked youths who dance admirably, understand something of billiards, much less of horses, and still less of navigation, soon grow inexpressibly wearisome to us; but the men who adopt their social courtesy, never seeking to arouse, uplift, instruct us, ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... top, by the wild hedge where spindle-berries hung pink, seats were placed, and from here the view was very beautiful. The hill dropped steep beneath him. A river wound on the near side of the city, crossed by a white bridge. The city lay close clustered, ruddy on the plains, glittering in the clear air ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... of their subsistence from the chase, and possess the athletic mind and body which result from active methods of winning a livelihood. The former are, to a great extent, victims of that generic and hereditary tabes mesenterica which produces the peculiar pot-bellied and spindle-shanked type of savage; their manners are milder; their virtues and vices are done in water-color, as comports with their source of supply. There are some tribes which partake of the habits of both classes, living in mountain-fastnesses part of the year by the bow and arrow, but coming down ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... Which when the lady knew, she took her spindle 145 And twined three threads of fleecy mist, and three Long lines of light, such as the dawn may kindle The clouds and waves and mountains with; and she As many star-beams, ere their lamps could dwindle In the belated moon, wound skilfully; 150 ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Candle and fiddle in hand, Jinnie mounted them and halted before the unopened door. Somehow it seemed as if she would find before the grate the long, thin body of her dead father, and she distinctly remembered the spindle fire-flames falling in golden yellow licks upon his face. In her imagination she could again see the flake-like ashes, thrown out from the smoldering fire, rise grey to the ceiling, then descend silently over him ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... have seen all these. In long remote places they are still to be found. In the neighborhood of Chicago's Hull House was found a woman to whom the spinning-wheel was a wonderful modern invention! She spun with a spindle—like Clotho. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... his part strives his utmost to find out faults in his neighbor and to put him in the pillory, particularly if his antagonist is held the greater man, or is likely to overtop him. Listen to the girls at the well, to the women at the spindle; no one is sure of applause who cannot tell some evil of the other men or women. Who cares to listen to his neighbor's praises? The man who hears that his brother is happy at once envies him! Hatred, hatred everywhere! Everywhere the will, the desire, the passion for bringing grief and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... account of the peculiar circumstances in which it was preserved. However, the cranial walls still contained some animal matter, were still somewhat fatty to the touch, and retained some odour. A spindle provided with a whorl made from a piece of pine-bark, which was lying among the bones in the cave, indicates that the body of this female had not been put there in recent times. This variety of ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... could all three see something which was invisible to me. I read it from their tense faces and their staring eyes. Toussac swung his axe over his shoulder and poised himself for a blow. Lesage cowered away and put one hand between his eyes and the open door. The other ceased swinging his spindle legs and sat like a little brown image upon the edge of his box. There was a moist pattering of feet, a yellow streak shot through the doorway, and Toussac lashed at it as I have seen an English cricketer strike at a ball. His aim was true, for he buried the head of the hatchet ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the secluded cell, she found herself in the presence of an old hag, who kept murmuring to herself a Saxon rhyme, as if to beat time to the spindle at which she was engaged. As soon as they were alone the old woman addressed the Jewess, telling her that she was once as young and fair as herself, when Front-de-Boeuf, the father of the man who now lorded it in the castle, attacked the place ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... brass, with its brave, gay canopy; the mill-made wash-stand, with its pitcher and bowl of blinding red and green china, the straw-framed lithographs of symbolic female figures against the multi-coloured, new wall-paper; the inadequate spindle chairs of white and gold; the sphere of tissue paper hanging from the gas fixture, and the plumes of pampas grass tacked to the wall at artistic angles, and overhanging two astonishing oil paintings, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... diligent burnishes his arms, and another grooms his horse. A few veiled women come and go, bearing jars of water or other burdens, though most of the female population are occupied in their apartments with the preparation of food, and in the labors of the loom and spindle; while young children, half-naked, play around the house doors and through the lanes with an activity in strong contrast with the prevailing tone of grave ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... be removed from the works by blowing with bellows, or a fan, or dusting with a dry brush; in the latter case great care should be exercised not to injure any of the parts. Dip the brush in the benzine and clean the spindles and spindle holes, and the teeth of the escapement wheel. After washing a part, wipe the brush on the rag and rinse in the benzine; this should be repeated frequently, until no more ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... old dame hasten to her inner room, and there she pricked herself with her spindle, until a great red drop of her heart's blood fell into her trembling hand. With witchery of words she blew upon it, and rolled it in her palm, and muttering, turned and turned and turned it. And as the spell was laid upon it, it shrivelled into a tiny ...
— The Legend of the Bleeding-heart • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the Balfours of Pilrig, and was of gentle blood, on the spindle side. An ancestress of his mother was a granddaughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot (as a "law lord," or judge, Lord Minto), and so he could say: "I have shaken a spear in the debatable land, and shouted the slogan of the Elliots": perhaps "And wha dares meddle wi' me!" In "Weir ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... day, and went straight to the carpenter, bullied him again, and after bearing it for awhile Chips's adze would become so blunt that he was obliged to go off to the grindstone, where he would stop for a couple of hours, a good deal of which time was spent in oiling the spindle before he began. ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... bear ere he sells its hide! He has never tried to mount the Eagle's Ladder! Why, man, Adlerstein might be held against five hundred men by sister Johanna with her rock and spindle! 'Tis a free barony, Master Gottfried, I tell thee—has never sworn allegiance to Kaiser or Duke of Swabia either! Freiherr Eberhard is as much a king on his own rock as Kaiser Fritz ever was of the Romans, and more too, for I never could find out that they thought much of our king at Rome; and, ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... each deep emotion? How does he conquer every element? But by the tide of song that from his bosom springs, And draws into his heart all living things? When Nature's hand, in endless iteration, The thread across the whizzing spindle flings, When the complex, monotonous creation Jangles with all its million strings: Who, then, the long, dull series animating, Breaks into rhythmic march the soulless round? And, to the law of All each member consecrating, Bids one majestic harmony resound? Who bids ...
— Faust • Goethe
... none here but we two? When didst thou see the starveling schoolmaster? That rat, that shrimp, that spindle-shank, That wren, that sheep-biter, that lean chitty-face, That famine, that lean envy, that all-bones, That bare anatomy, that Jack-a-Lent, That ghost, that shadow, that moon ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... turning to his friend, "could be too good for my schoolmate Lotbiniere. Here are two chairs worthy of us, generals among this spindle-shanked regiment. Sit down in that one while I draw up here opposite. Throw off the wigs; there. We shall see now how much of each other remains after our long parting. In India I never wore a wig except to ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weathercock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... should have valve bodies, caps and yokes of steel castings. Spindles should be of some non-corrosive metal, such as "monel metal". Seat rings should be removable of the same non-corrosive metal as should the spindle seats and plug faces. ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... would bend to make wicker-ware; at least, none yet found out: and as to the wheel-barrow, I fancied I could make all but the wheel, but that I had no notion of; neither did I know how to go about it: besides, I had no possible way to make iron gudgeons for the spindle or axis of the wheel to run in; so I gave it over: and, for carrying away the earth which I dug out of the cave, I made me a thing like a hod, which the labourers carry mortar in for the brick-layers. This was not so difficult to me as the making the shovel: ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... has a 4 in. steel spindle with self-acting variable feed motion through a range of 10 in., and the radial arm is raised or lowered by power through a range of 2 ft. 8 in. When the arm is in its highest position there is room for a piece of work ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... four lobes spreading, rounded, fringed around ends, but scarcely on sides. Four stamens inserted on corolla tube; 1 pistil with 2 stigmas. Stem: 1 to 3 ft. high, usually branched, leafy. Leaves: Opposite, upper ones acute at tip, broadening to heart-shaped base, seated on stem. Fruit: A spindle-shaped, 2-valved capsule, containing numerous scaly, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... carry. Bob seized the carpet-bag and almost lifted the dignified little lad himself off his feet in his joyful welcome, while Jack, finding nothing else to do, stood still and hurrahed. They soon had the dear little spindle-shanks and his great carpet-bag stowed away in the skiff. As they rowed to the north bank of the river, Columbus explained how Dr. Lanham had undertaken to pay his expenses, if the boys would take him into partnership, but he said he was 'most afraid to come, because he couldn't chop ...
— The Hoosier School-boy • Edward Eggleston
... cutter through the ring in line with the gear axis. This would require a special or, at least, radically modified gear-cutting machine with a cutter arbor shorter than the inside diameter of the gear. Into this short space the spindle bearings and means of driving the spindle would have to be crowded, along with the cutter. Hopkins faced a problem similar to this in cutting the ring gear for his watch, except that the brass gear needed for the rotary watch could be cut far more easily and ...
— The Auburndale Watch Company - First American Attempt Toward the Dollar Watch • Edwin A. Battison
... in readiness for work, can be worked by inexperienced workmen. The bed plate has T slots, to receive a parallel vise, which can be fixed at any angle for angular cutting. The articulated lever carries a saw of 10 in. or 12 in. diameter, on the spindle of which a bronze pinion is fixed, gearing with the worm shown. The latter derives motion from a pair of bevel wheels, which are in turn actuated from the pulley shown in the engraving. The lever and the saw connected with it can be raised and held up by a pawl ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... archaeologists tell us of having found, in the east of the Ural Mountains and on the shores of the Joswa, hammers, hatchets, pestles, nuclei the shape of polygonal prisms, and round or long pieces of flint, all pierced with a central hole, which are supposed to have been spindle whorls. Lastly, Klementz tells us that the lofty valleys of the Yenesei and its tributaries were inhabited in the most remote times by races who developed a ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... woman, sprang up from the bushes, and pulled at the cord about the cow's neck. From beneath the crimson handkerchief about the woman's head, fair matted hair escaped, something as tow hangs about a spindle. She wore no kerchief at the throat. A coarse black-and-gray striped woolen petticoat, too short by several inches, left her legs bare. She might have belonged to some tribe of Redskins in Fenimore Cooper's ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... dejection, I thought I saw a place where a flat roller would remedy the whole misfortune; but a flat roller at Cape Spartivento, hard, easily unshipped, running freely! There was a grooved pulley used for the paying-out machinery with a spindle wheel, which might suit me. I filled him up with tarry spunyarn, nailed sheet copper round him, bent some parts in the fire; and we are paying-in without more trouble now. You would think some one would praise me; no, no ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fingers would be a most tedious operation; in the common spinning-wheel the velocity of the foot is moderate; but, by a very simple contrivance, that of the thread is most rapid. A piece of cat-gut passing round a large wheel, and then round a small spindle, effects this change. The small balls of sewing cotton, so cheap and so beautifully wound, are formed by a machine on the same principle, and but a few steps more complicated. The common smoke-jack is an instrument ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... witch should be an old woman with a wrinkled face, a furred brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaky voice, a scolding tongue, having a ragged coat on her back, a skull cap on her head, a spindle in her hand, a dog or cat by her side. There are three classes or divisions of devils—black, grey, and white. The first are omnipotent for evil, but powerless for good. The white have power to help, but not to hurt. The grey are efficient for both good and evil.... The modes of bewitching ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... of the New England mills was extraordinary. James Montgomery, an English cotton manufacturer, visited the Lowell mills two years before Dickens and wrote after his inspection of them that they produced "a greater quantity of yarn and cloth from each spindle and loom (in a given time) than was produced by any other factories, without exception in the world." Long before that time, of course, the basic type of loom had changed from that originally introduced, and many New England inventors had been busy devising improved ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... She gather'd coin and flax she bought, And many a night her spindle plying, Good store of fine-spun thread she wrought. The thread was fashion'd in the loom; She brought it home, and calmly seated To work, with not a thought of gloom, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... preserved from love. Pleased with his pipe, he sits and smokes in his elbow-chair; totally unknown to him is the ardent passion that actuates the sentimental soul: alas! unhappy man! he never indulged in the pleasing reverie which inspires the spindle-shanked lover, as he strays through nodding forest by gliding stream; if he marries, he chooses a companion fat as himself; they lie together, and most musical is their snore, they melt like two pounds of butter in one plate in ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... this week I hired that little spindle-legged Barney boy. I hired him to keep this dumbed office clean so's my old woman wouldn't raise such hell every time she steps in here. I'm goshed if this here stove don't get fuller of ashes quicker than any other stove in Green Valley. And ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... their sense of labour, by the usual rude song: {50} one man imitating the profession of a shoemaker; another, that of a tanner. Now you may see a girl with a distaff, drawing out the thread, and winding it again on the spindle; another walking, and arranging the threads for the web; another, as it were, throwing the shuttle, and seeming to weave. On being brought into the church, and led up to the altar with their oblations, you will be astonished to see them suddenly awakened, and coming ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... heirs—male. He is in doubt whether to lay the fault on Mr. Squills or on us,—I am not sure that he does not think it a conspiracy of all three to settle the representation of the martial De Caxtons on the "spindle side." Whosoever be the right person to blame, an omission so fatal to the straight line in the pedigree is rectified at last, and Mrs. Primmins again rushes, or rather rolls—in the movement natural to forms globular and spheral—into ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... only by a ladder. Hither ascended a cantonnier when the new road was made up the valley, and here he found chipped flints of primeval man, a polished celt, a scrap of Samian ware, and in a niche at the side sealed up with stalactite, a tiny earthenware pitcher 2-1/2 inches high, a leaden spindle-whorl, some shells, and a toy sheep-bell. Here a little shepherdess during the stormy times, when the Routiers ravaged the country, had her refuge while she watched her flock of goats, and here made ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... care for these if you have Neptune aboard. His spirit will bid you jibe your sail to that freshening west wind off Allerton and bowl down the coast parallel with the long stretch of Nantasket sands. Again at the spindle on Harding's Ledge you may catch cunners; perhaps a stray cod. A cod! There you speak a magic word to the fisherman from the tide flats far inland. There is the golden fleece for which the Argonauts of the land-locked harbor ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... third, she is tall and slender, a fragile spindle, a slim, sylph-like creature, suggesting a taper with the lower portion patterned, embossed, brocaded in the wax itself; she stands magnificently arrayed in a stiff-pleated robe channelled lengthwise, like a stick ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... which a block or pully was fastened. Round this piece of timber a stage or platform was constructed, four feet broad, and about eighteen feet long, which was strongly fastened with iron. The entrance was lengthways, and it could be moved about the piece of timber, first described, as on a spindle, and could be hoisted within six feet of the top. Round this there was a parapet, knee high, which was defended with upright bars of iron, sharpened at the end. Towards the top there was a ring, through which a rope was fastened, ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... wheel was cracked clean through, as if some one had struck it with the head of an axe, and one of the pallets of the spindle was stuck fast in the crack. He could knock it out easily enough, but when the crack came around again, the pallet would catch and the clock would stop once more. ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... most Arachnida, crabs, and other articulates. It was also proposed to secure several spiders in the above manner upon the periphery of a wheel, the revolution of which would give a twist to their conjoined threads, carried through a common eyelet upon the spindle; but this can be accomplished without the inconvenience of whirling the spiders out of sight, by modifications of the apparatus which has always been used for twisting ordinary silk. It will probably be inferred from the above, that, in securing the spider, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... maidens neither to give indulgence to love, nor to wash away cares with delicious wine; or to be dispirited out of dread of the lashes of an uncle's tongue. The winged boy of Venus, O Neobule, has deprived you of your spindle and your webs, and the beauty of Hebrus from Lipara of inclination for the labors of industrious Minerva, after he has bathed his anointed shoulders in the waters of the Tiber; a better horseman than Bellerophon himself, neither ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... the sun. Then the old fairy's turn came. Shaking her head spitefully, she uttered the wish that when the baby grew up into a young lady, and learned to spin, she might prick her finger with the spindle and die ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... (cylindrical).—Stem and joints cylindrical, the latter covered with spindle-shaped tubercles, each one crowned with a tuft of fine, hair-like, whitish spines, one or two in each tuft being stiff, and sharp as needles. The leaves are fleshy, cylindrical, 1 in. or more long, and they remain on the joints ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... snarled Shrimp, beside himself. "Is that what ye call letting yer arms hang naturally. Where did ye get yer ideas of nature, anyway, ye spindle-shanked carpenter's apprentice?" ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock
... A table, with four spindle legs, stood in the room; the doctor drew it up to the bed, found a tumbler and a phial on the mantel-shelf, and composed a draught, by carefully measuring a few drops of brown liquid from the phial into some water, Genestas holding the light ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... various environment, each tribe adopted different customs and built up from common roots the different dialects. These tribes have always been, and always will be, mere barbarians and savages. In the pure type of Negritos, spindle legs, large turned-in feet, weak bodies, and large heads are noticeable. Shifting eyes, flat noses, kinky hair, and teeth irregularly set,—these are Negrito characteristics, though they frequently occur in the mestizo types. The Igorrotes of Luzon, ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... looked like mysterious lakes in the moonlight when the white mist rose from the marshes and spread all over their surface—endlessly as it seemed. He promised me to plan out a garden, and there being several fine trees about the kiln and on the border of the road—oaks, elders, elms, and spindle trees—he said he would contrive to keep them all, so as to have shade from the beginning, and to give the new garden an appearance ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... At the same time he produced two pieces of soft wood from some hiding place in his garments. One of these, known as the "spindle," was a stick about two feet long by three-quarters of an inch in diameter and having a rounded point. The other, called the "hearth," was flat, about eighteen inches in length, half an inch thick, and three inches wide. On its upper surface, close to one edge, were several slight ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... thought about himself had a large share in his immunity from weariness. He continued slight and thin—which was natural, for he was growing fast; but the muscles of his little bird-like legs seemed of steel. The spindle-shanks went striding, striding without a check, along the roughest roads, the pale face shining atop of them like a sweet calm moon. To Mr. Person's eyes, the moon, stooping, as she sometimes seems to do, downward from the sky, always looked like him. The child woke something ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... us there are three areas of the throwing-stick: Australia, where it is simply an elongated spindle with a hook at the end; the country of the Conibos and the Purus, on the Upper Amazon, where the implement resembles that of the Australians, and the ...
— Throwing-sticks in the National Museum • Otis T. Mason
... gray-eyed Athena; and all the wisest and the fairest of the immortals. The nymphs of the sea danced in honor of Thetis their sister; and the Muses sang their sweetest songs; and Apollo played upon the lyre. The Fates, too, were there: sad Clotho, twirling her spindle; unloving Lachesis, with wrinkled lips ready to speak the fatal word; and pitiless Atropos, holding in her hand the unsparing shears. And around the table passed the youthful and joy-giving Hebe, pouring out rich draughts of nectar for ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... woman pulled the long-fibered straggling lock of wool, sorted out and rejected from the uniform fleeces, carded it with her little hand cards into yard-long finger-sized rolls, and twisted it upon her large wheel spindle, producing much such thread as an Italian peasant woman spins upon her distaff to-day as she walks ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... rich" you will have the pleasure of seeing your primitive windlass grow to a "whip," a "whim," and eventually to a big powerful engine, with its huge drum and Eiffel tower-like "poppet heads," or "derrick," with their great spindle pulley wheels revolving at dizzy speed high ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... showed off her dainty feet, and a French hairdresser stood behind her chair putting the finishing touches to the imposing fabric of powder, flower, and feather upon her head. A little hand-mirror, framed in carved ivory inlaid with coral, and a fan, lay on a tiny spindle-legged table close in front of her, together with a buff-coloured cup of chocolate. At a somewhat larger table Mrs. Loveday, her woman, was dispensing the chocolate, whilst a little negro boy, in a fantastic Oriental costume, waited ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on, desperately, it seemed to me. 'Another picture, Smiles. Can you see a spindle-legged, mischievous boy of ten, who loved his little sister dearly; but teased her from morning until night. His name ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... inclined to play the part of the young enthusiast in "Excelsior," as I looked up at the weathercock which surmounts the spire. But the man who oils the weathercock-spindle has to get up to it in some way, and that way is by ladders which reach to within thirty feet of the top, where there is a small door, through which he emerges, to crawl up the remaining distance on the outside. "The situation and appearance," ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Abbot: much vain unreason he hears; lays up without response. He is not there to expect reason and nobleness of others; he is there to give them of his own reason and nobleness. Is he not their servant, as we said, who can suffer from them, and for them; bear the burden their poor spindle-limbs totter and stagger under; and, in virtue of being their servant, govern them, lead them out of weakness into strength, out of ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... nothing to the purpose, for, even had an alias been beyond the invention of the knaves of that generation, it is known that servants were often called by their masters' names, as slaves are now. On what the heralds call the spindle side, some, at least, of the oldest Virginian families are descended from matrons who were exported and sold for so many hogsheads of tobacco the head. So notorious was this, that it became one of the jokes of contemporary playwrights, not only that men bankrupt ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... ever been made of the wheel. The spinning-girl of Dacca, who twists, and for ages has twisted, a pound of cotton into a thread two hundred and fifty miles long, beating Manchester by ninety miles, has no wheel, unless you so call a ball of clay, of the size of a pea, stuck fast on one end of her spindle, by means of which she twists it between her thumb and finger. But this wonderful mechanical feat costs her many months of labor, to say nothing of previous training; while the Manchester factory-girl, aided by the multiplying power of the wheel, easily ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... encloses a mass of similar cells developed from the archesporium. Some of these become spore-mother-cells and give rise by cell division to four spores, while others remain undivided and become the elaters. The latter are elongated spindle-shaped cells with thick brown spiral bands on the inside of their thin walls. They radiate out from a small plug of sterile cells projecting into the base of the capsule, and some are attached to this, while others lie free among the spores. The latter are large, and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... lost land, Over the sea the thousand miles, And know if yet that woman smiles With the calm smile; some little farm She lives in there, no doubt: what harm 150 If I sat on the door-side bench, And, while her spindle made a trench Fantastically in the dust, Inquired of all her fortunes—just Her children's ages and their names, And what may be the husband's aims For each of them. I'd talk this out, And sit there, for an hour about, Then kiss her hand once more, and lay Mine on her head, and ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... much used now, is still occasionally employed, except in large factories. This combing is repeated two or three times, till it is sufficiently smooth and even for spinning. Spinning or converting wool, or cotton, silk, &c. into thread, was anciently performed by the distaff and spindle: these we find mentioned in sacred history, and they have been used in all ages, and in all countries yet discovered. The natives of India, and of some other parts of the world, ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... carry very little, and that what it would otherwise bear, on that account, must tumble and roll off, so I made a fire and turned smith; for with a great deal to do breaking off the wards of a large key I had, and making it red-hot, I by degrees fashioned it into a kind of spindle, and therewith making holes quite round the bottom of my cart, in them I stuck up sticks about two feet high that I had tapered at the end ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... slow lowering of its height the Thing advanced. Now its form was that of a spindle a full mile in length on whose bulging ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... Biorn, they nicknamed Ironsides; another Sigurd, Snake in the Eye; another, White Sark, or White Shirt—I wonder they did not call him Dirty Shirt, and Ivarr, another, who was King of Northumberland, they called Beinlausi, or the Legless, because he was spindle-shanked, had no sap in his bones, and consequently no children. He was a great king, it is true, and very wise, nevertheless his blackguard countrymen, always averse, as their descendants are, to give credit to anybody, for any valuable quality or possession, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... been three times injured by lightning. Forty feet of the spire, in a decayed state, was taken down and rebuilt in 1781, with stone from Attleborough, near Nuneaton; and strengthened by a spindle of iron, running up its centre 105 feet long, secured to the side walls every ten feet, by braces—the expence, ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... time, Orthia the sanguinary, Hymnia of Orchomena, the Saphria of the Patraeans, Aphia of AEgina, Bendis of Thrace, and Stymphalia with the leg of a bird. Triopas, in place of three eyeballs, has nothing more than three orbits. Erichthonius, with spindle-shanks, crawls like a cripple ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... he was not, whereupon Mr. Harum hitched himself up onto a high office stool, with his heels on the spindle, and leaned sideways upon the desk, while John stood facing him with his left ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... thy tasks at home, There guide the spindle, and direct the loom; Me glory summons to the martial scene, The field of combat is the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... first odd number that doth rise From the two foremost numbers' unity, That odd and even are; which are two and three; For one no number is; but thence doth flow The powerful race of number. Next, did go 340 A noble matron, that did spinning bear A huswife's rock and spindle, and did wear A wether's skin, with all the snowy fleece, To intimate that even the daintiest piece And noblest-born dame should industrious be: That which does good disgraceth no degree. And now to Juno's temple they are come, Where her grave priest ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... destitute of clothing, and who seemed to enjoy with infinite zest the pastime of shooting-practice with little bows and arrows. No wonder that these Indians become expert bowmen. There were urchins there, scarce two feet high, with round bullets of bodies and short spindle-shanks, who could knock blackbirds off the trees at every shot, and cut the heads off the taller flowers with perfect certainty! There was much need, too, for the utmost proficiency they could attain, for the very existence of the Indian tribes ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... the ship, of cloth of silk that should never rot for no manner of weather. Yet went that lady and made a carpenter to come to the tree which Abel was slain under. Now, said she, carve me out of this tree as much wood as will make me a spindle. Ah madam, said he, this is the tree the which our first mother planted. Do it, said she, or else I shall destroy thee. Anon as he began to work there came out drops of blood: and then would he have ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... the lamp should burn, Watching the weary spindle twist and turn, Or o'er the web hold back her tears and yearn: O winter, O white ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... later when he reached Stirling's house, and was left to wait a few minutes in a very artistically-furnished room. Its floor was of polished parquetry with a few fine skins from British Columbia spread upon it here and there, and the dainty, spindle-legged chairs, the little tables, the cabinets and the Watteau figures were, he fancied, either of old French manufacture or excellent copies. The big basement heater had apparently been extinguished, but a snapping wood-fire blazed upon the English pattern hearth, ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... high-backed mahogany chairs against the wall, polished by age and careful rubbing to that stage of dark shininess which makes even mahogany pleasant to the eye, and with seats of flowering silk damask whose texture must have been very good to be so faded without being worn; there were spindle-legged side-tables holding inlaid "papier-mache" desks and rose-wood work-boxes, and two or three carved cedar or sandal-wood cases of various shapes. And, most tempting of all to my mind, there were glass-doored cupboards in the wall, with great treasures of handleless ...
— "Us" - An Old Fashioned Story • Mary Louisa S. Molesworth
... his shape, was Michael Scot, Practis'd in ev'ry slight of magic wile. "Guido Bonatti see: Asdente mark, Who now were willing, he had tended still The thread and cordwain; and too late repents. "See next the wretches, who the needle left, The shuttle and the spindle, and became Diviners: baneful witcheries they wrought With images and herbs. But onward now: For now doth Cain with fork of thorns confine On either hemisphere, touching the wave Beneath the towers of Seville. Yesternight The moon was ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... see him owre his trash, As feckles as wither'd rash, His spindle shank, a guid whip-lash; His nieve a nit; Thro' blody flood or field to dash, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... against her stepmother now asserted itself, and she pushed back the stool on which she was sitting with such violence that it fell with a crash on the floor, and, as it fell, knocked against the spindle at which another of the maidens was sitting, and the thread snapped ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... locomotion. He was dressed in a black coat and waistcoat, white cravat and high collar to his shirt, blue cotton net pantaloons and Hessian boots, both fitting so tight, that it appeared as if he was proud of his spindle shanks. His hat was broad-brimmed and low, and he carried a stout black cane with a gold top in his right hand, almost always raising the gold top to his nose when he spoke, just as we see doctors represented at a consultation in the caricature prints. But if his figure was strange, ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... maidens. She considereth a field and buyeth it; with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.... She perceiveth that her merchandise is profitable. Her lamp goeth not out by night. She layeth her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle.... She maketh for herself carpets of tapestry.... She maketh linen garments and selleth them; and delivereth girdles unto ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... of heavier wood, frequently mountain mahogany. It was the same diameter as the arrow, only tapering a trifle toward the front end, and usually was about six inches long. This was carefully shaped into a spindle at the larger end and set in the recently drilled hole of the shaft, using glue or resin for this purpose. The joint was bound with chewed sinew, set ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... Mons. MARIUS, who, as the French sporting nobleman, in Family Ties, in love with an English "Mees," and so proud of his English slang, was simply the character to the life, without any more exaggeration than was artistically necessary. On "the Spindle Side," Miss LILY HANBURY looks handsome, and is generally fairly well-suited; Miss PATTIE BROWNE has the most difficult part of the three, and it is not to be wondered at if she a bit out-tommies Tommy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... glowing ashes and red-hot iron was on the ground. At a little distance lay a flat iron disc, called the "platform"; with a pole in the centre through which ran a spindle. On this metal plate lay a new cast wheel, and the wright with a bar screwed a nut so as to hold the cart-wheel down ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... During its vast periods there were great discoveries and great inventions in various parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe. The Neoliths made pottery and bricks; we know that they invented the art of spinning, for spindle-whorls are found even in the Gezer caves to which we have referred, while in Egypt the pre-Dynastic dead were sometimes wrapped in finely woven linen: their deftly chipped flint implements are eloquent ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... however, to contain him, as he lay curled up, sucking his thumb, and hugging to his breast the soft fragment of a sea-bird's downy breast. If he stirred, his mother's foot was on the rocker, as she sat spinning, but her spindle danced languidly on the floor, as if "feeble was her hand, and silly her thread;" while she listened anxiously, for every sound in the street below. She wore a dark blue dress, with a small lace ruff opening in front, deep cuffs to match, and a white apron likewise edged with lace, ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that day. On the beech-trees were still just enough of coppery leaves to look like fires lighted high-up to air the eeriness; but most of the twigs, pearled with water, were patterned very naked against universal grey. Berries were few, except the pink spindle one, so far the most beautiful, of which there were more than Earth generally vouchsafes. There was no sound in the deep lanes, none of that sweet, overhead sighing of yesterday at the same hour, but there was a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the Guests; for with this Table every one helps himself, by turning any Dish he likes before him, without interrupting any body. You must have first, a large Table with an hole in the Middle, of an Inch Diameter, wherein should be fix'd a Socket of Brass well turn'd, to admit of a Spindle of Brass, that will turn easily in it. The Table I speak of, may be, I suppose, five or six Foot diameter; and then have another Table-board made just so large, that as it is to act on the Centre of the first Table, there may ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... souls! And how many, finally, obtained the precious crown of martyrdom, after having coursed the sands of so many hardships, which were ended either by the edge of the sword, or by a spear-thrust, or at the spindle of hardships, or at grief at seeing holy things so outraged, or by the inundations of penalties in atrocious captivities! Mention has been made of many in the preceding volumes, but some who will serve to ornament this volume ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... didn't like and nothing that they did! Whose constitution required mutton chops hot and hot, and buttered toast in similar relays! And with whom one of Little Dombey's earliest dialogues in the Reading awakened invariably such bursts of hearty laughter! Seated in his tall, spindle-legged arm-chair by the fire, staring steadily at the exemplary Pipchin, Little Paul, we were told, was asked [in the most snappish voice possible], by that austere female, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... result has been accomplished chiefly by means of Mitchell's screw-mooring, an instrument which consists essentially of an enormous cast-iron screw of about one turn and a half, having a hollow cylindrical centre; a wrought-iron spindle passes through the cylindrical socket; it is somewhat tapering in form, and when driven up tight is fixed thereto by a forelock passing through both; it is formed with a square head to receive the key for screwing it into the ground. It is also furnished with a collar ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... our path, and the fine level road is adorned with a beautiful red flower named Bolcamaria. The markets or sleeping-places are well supplied with provisions by great numbers of women, every one of whom is seen spinning cotton with a spindle and distaff, exactly like those which were in use among the ancient Egyptians. A woman is scarcely ever seen going to the fields, though with a pot on her head, a child on her back, and the hoe over her shoulder, but she is employed in this way. The cotton was brought to the market for sale, and ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... Chaucer, a Keats as well as a Gower, yet I am glad that the result of my studies tends to prove that it is but an unfounded assumption. By the Spear-side his family was at least respectable, and by the Spindle-side his pedigree can be traced straight back to Guy of Warwick and the good King Alfred. There is something in fallen fortune that lends a subtler romance to the consciousness of a noble ancestry, and we may be sure this played no small part in the ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... congratulations of their friends, and the bride, taken with apparent force from the arms of her mother, as the Sabine women were taken in the days of Romulus, was conducted to her new home carrying a distaff and a spindle, emblems of the industry that was thought necessary in the household work that she was to perform or direct. Strong men lifted her over the threshold, lest her foot should trip upon it, and her husband saluted her with fire and water, symbolic of welcome, after which he presented her the ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... people on the stairs. It was the grimmest room I have ever had the nightmare in; and all the furniture, from the four posts of the bed to the two old silver candle-sticks, was tall, high-shouldered, and spindle-waisted. Below, in my sitting-room, if I looked round my screen, the wind rushed at me like a mad bull; if I stuck to my arm-chair, the fire scorched me to the colour of a new brick. The chimney-piece was very high, and there was a bad glass—what I may call a wavy glass—above it, ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... into the drawing-room in good time; she could look about her, and learn how to feel at home in her new quarters. The room was forty-feet long or so, fitted up with yellow satin at some distant period; high spindle-legged chairs and pembroke- tables abounded. The carpet was of the same date as the curtains, and was threadbare in many places; and in others was covered with drugget. Stands of plants, great jars of flowers, old Indian china and ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... it, however, exhibited fewer signs of the strange, long-past agitation. In dimensions it was similar to the dining-room, running from front to back of the house. Here, too, was another elaborate candelabrum, somewhat smaller than the first, queer, spindle-legged, fiddle-backed chairs, beautiful cabinets and tables, and an old, square piano, still open. The chairs stood in irregular groups of twos and threes, chumming cozily together as their occupants had doubtless done, and over the piano had been carelessly ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... horizon, as if that spell were laid on them which hushed the enchanted palace. There was just sea enough to roll the bell-buoy gently, and now and then was rung an idle note of warning. Three fishing-boats lay anchored off the Spindle, rising and falling, and every now and then a sea broke on the rock. On the white sand beach, waves were rolling in, dying softly away along the shore, or heavily breaking, with a ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... But there were many things which could not conveniently be smuggled, and in their case the want of competition, and still more the lack of standards of comparison, tended to retard and injure production. While improved machinery for spinning and weaving was common in England, the old spindle, wheel, and house-loom still held their own in France. In the year 1786, a commercial treaty was signed between the two countries. By its provisions French wines were put on a better footing, and many manufactured ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... rooster straightened up from his agricultural labors, and stared at this lone intruder on his family privacy. He was a tall, rakish-looking fowl, whose erect carriage and lack of tail-feathers made him look like a spindle-shanked urchin as he towered there among the ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... spindle shaped, like those of very young girls, were encircled with a kind of metal ornament, and bracelets of glass beads; her hair was twisted into little cords; on her breast hung a green paste idol, identified by her whip of seven lashes ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... for her afternoon siesta, and soon fell asleep on the cool chintz lounge, in her shaded room, where the old-fashioned furniture, high bedstead, spindle-legged chairs, and antique toilet-table, had remained unchanged from her youth, when the oval mirror reflected back a merry, rosy girl-face, instead of the pale, ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... one end of which he sat in the shadow. There was something very homelike about this hall. The quaint landscape paper on the walls, the perceptibly worn and faded crimson Turkey carpeting on the floors, the wide, spindle-balustrade staircase with the old clock on its landing; more than all, perhaps, on an October night like this, the warm glow from a lamp with crystal pendants which stood on the table of polished mahogany near the front door—all these things combined ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... that the first application perforates the stamps of one row on three sides. The application of the machine to the next row below completes the fourth side. In the best perforating machines the needles are arranged in circles around a spindle. The sheets pass under this roller and are perforated in one direction. A similar machine makes the ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff |
