"Skein" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rain sifting softly through the leafless trees, and answering to the faint sighing of the autumn wind. Morris enjoyed it very much, and but for the green glasses he still wore would have looked and appeared like his former self as he sat in his armchair, now holding the skein of yarn which Aunt Betsy wound, now talking with the deacon of the probable exchange of all the prisoners, a theme which quickened Helen's pulse and sent the blood to her pale cheeks, and again standing by Katy as she played his favorite airs, his rich bass voice mingling ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... found it impossible to unravel the tangled skein of their relationship, and to assign a definite amount of blame to each. She did not shirk hers, and was willing to accept a full measure. That she had done wrong in marrying him, and again in leaving him to marry another man, she acknowledged freely. Wrong as she knew this to have been, severely ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and closely with twine before they are thrown into the dye pot. The winding must be close enough to prevent the dye penetrating to the yarn. This means, of course, when the clouding is to be of white and another color. If it is to be two shades of one color, as a light and medium blue, the skein is first dyed a light blue, and after drying, is wound as I have described, and thrown again into the dye pot, until the unwound portions become the darker blue which ...
— Hand-Loom Weaving - A Manual for School and Home • Mattie Phipps Todd
... truth each breast. Now doubting hangs, by awe possessed, And homage pays to that dread might, That judges what is hid from sight,— That, fathomless, inscrutable, The gloomy skein of fate entwines, That reads the bosom's depths full well, Yet flies away ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... that it was Weld's. He says that when he first had his head examined at Utica, he was told he was deficient in the organ of color, his eyebrow showing it. He immediately remembered that his mother often told him: 'Theodore, it is of no use to send you to match a skein of silk, for you never bring the right color.' When relating this, he observed a general titter in the room, and on inquiring the reason a candle was put near him, and, to his amazement, all agreed that the legs of his pantaloons were of different shades of green. Instead of a ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... story bears a certain similarity to that of Mysterier, Vicioria, and Pan, being a love affair of mazy windings, a tangled skein of loves-me-loves-me-not. But it is pure comedy throughout. Rolandsen, the telegraph operator in love with Elsie Mack, is no poet; he has not even any pretensions to education or social standing. He is a cheerful, riotous "blade," who sports with the girls of the village, gets drunk ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... the English people. Freeman delved long among the chronicles of Normans and Saxons; Stubbs no less laboriously excavated the charters of the Plantagenets; Froude hewed his path through the State papers of the Tudors; while Gardiner patiently unravelled the tangled skein of Stuart misgovernment. John Richard Green, one of the youngest of the school, took a wider subject, the continuous history of the English people. He was fortunate in writing at a time when the public was prepared to find the subject interesting, but he himself ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... had made any progress in unravelling his skein of perplexities he saw Janie coming across the lawn. She took the chair her father had left and seemed to take her father's mood with it; the same oppressive silence settled on her. Neeld broke it ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... alas! did foes more deadly wait Than Saladin's fierce crew. The lamp of love Was changed for one of hate, which threw Its false and fatal skein of light above. A shuddering shock, a fearful ...
— Rowena & Harold - A Romance in Rhyme of an Olden Time, of Hastyngs and Normanhurst • Wm. Stephen Pryer
... Baron. Here is my master's passport, which we used to get the post-horses, and as my master has gone in the direction of Bordeaux with Monsieur the Baron's passport, and as Monsieur the Baron goes toward Geneva with my master's passport, the skein will probably be so tangled that the police, clever as their fingers are, can't ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... of the preliminaries to the Guiana expedition forms a tangled skein. The negotiations of Ralegh with France were certainly known to Winwood, and, there can be little doubt, to James also. Ralegh taxed the King by letter in October, 1618, with privity and assent to the arrangement, through Faige, ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... assembly) kunsido. Situation situacio, sido. Situation (post) oficio. Six ses. Sixteen dek-ses. Sixty sesdek. Size grandeco. Size (of a book) formato. Size glueto. Skate gliti. Skates glitiloj. Skein fadenaro. Skeleton skeleto. Sketch skizi. Sketch skizo. Skewer trapikileto. Skid malakcelo. Skiff boateto. Skilful lerta. Skill lerteco. Skilled lerta. Skim sensxauxmigi. Skimmer sxauxmkulero. Skin hauxto. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... by a bridle-path. At the top of the mountain they had come to a ledge of rock three feet high and had to leap their horses one by one up this ledge, and the enemy might have attacked them at any moment. And this incident was typical of what his life had been for the last few years. It had been a skein of adventure, and now his wife was his adventure. Flowers stood in pretty vases on his table in the summer-time and around the room were his books, and on the table his pens and paper. The dining-room was always a little surprise, so profusely was the table covered with silver. There were beautiful ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... vast hopes, but weak in deeds, I lift my heart and pray, That where the tangled skein of creeds Excludes ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... eating bully beef and biscuit on the parapet. He was spotlessly clean, he had not yet stuck his spoon down the rim of his stocking where his skein should have been, he had a table knife (p. 236) and fork (things that we, old soldiers, had dispensed with ages ago), in short, he was a hat-box fellow, togged up to the nines, and as yet, green to the grind ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... necessary—the committal of the soul to God. Look that thou thyself art in order, and leave to God the task of unraveling the skein of the world and of destiny. What do annihilation or immortality matter? What is to be, will be. And what will be, will be for the best. Faith in good—perhaps the individual wants nothing more for his passage through life. Only ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dining-room where I could not hinder them nor see what only husbands are permitted to behold. In spite of my feelings, I had to sit in the dining-room and converse with Pimenovna, one of the poor relations. Sasha, looking worried and excited, kept running by me with a thimble, a skein of wool or ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... to-day?" asked Lizzie Gordon, who was seated at the window winding up a ball of worsted, the skein of which was being held by Miss Puff, who was at that time ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... through, but it was another case altogether, no more like the other one than a apple-pie is like a mug o' cider. An' then they both took it up, an' they swung it around between them, till it was all twisted an' knotted an' wound up, an' tangled, worse than a skein o' yarn in a nest o' kittens, an' then they give ...
— Rudder Grange • Frank R. Stockton
... Blake looking slightly irritated as she wound a ball of white yarn from a skein that Docia was holding between ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... sing'st no siren strain To him who plows this heaven-domed main! Thy starry eyes look down all-wistful On souls that toy with a tangled skein. ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... seine was being contracted and drawn into the boat, where it was laid up like some gigantic brown skein, the men who were gathering it in shaking out the sea-weed and small fish that had enmeshed themselves and had forced their unfortunate heads ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... are also extremely interesting. Etienne Boileau, in his book of crafts, to which I have already alluded, tells us that a member of the guild was prohibited from using gold of less value than 'eight sous (about 6s.) the skein; he was bound to use the best silk, and never to mix thread with silk, because that made the work false and bad.' The test or trial piece prescribed for a worker who was the son of a master-embroiderer was 'a single figure, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... came to have tied ourselves into such an extraordinary mental knot is what bewilders me," Hadria continued, "and still more, why it is that we all, by common consent, go on acting and talking as if the tangled skein ran smooth and straight through ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... from her funnels in a twisted skein. What had once been ore in many a mine, and trees in many a forest, had become an individual, as what has been vegetables and fruits and the flesh of animals becomes at last a child with a ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... town-tired when they have first fled. She ran to the glass to know if the restoration she felt might also be seen. With unbiassed calculation the black-fringed lids drew apart and one hand pushed back of the temple, and held there, a tangled skein of hair that had thrown the dusk of a deep wood about her eyes. Then, as she looked, came the little dreaming smile that unfitted critic eyes for their office; a smile that wakened to a laugh as she looked—a little womanish chuckle of confident ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... into them as a falcon does into a skein of ducks. Wulf and I galloped and galloped over those accursed sand-heaps till the horses stuck fast; and when they got their wind again, we found each pair of dogs with a deer down between them—and what can man want more, if he cannot get fighting? ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... that you are crazy, perhaps you can inform me what caused you to become so." "Oh yes," replied he, "I can soon tell you that: first my father died, then my mother, and soon after my only sister hung herself to the limb of a tree with a skein of worsted yarn; and last, and worst of all, my wife, Dorcas Jane, drowned herself in Otter Creek." Wondering if there was any truth in this horrible story, or if it was only the creation of his own diseased mind, I said, ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... enter that room. The honest warrior was dismayed to find such a thing could have happened, and although he was unable to read the lettering, he turned the missive over and over in his hand as if he expected close scrutiny to unravel the skein. He then departed and questioned the guards closely, but was assured that no one had entered except ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... mast, and the other all hulk—she's a dome and he's built like a glass-house—when they part, you wonder to see the steeple separate from the chancel, and were they to embrace, he must hang round her neck like a skein of thread on a lace-maker's bolster—to sing her praise you should choose a rondeau, and to celebrate him you must ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... the more she read it, the more was she confused by the mixture of the first and third person; the substitution of the 'i' for the 'T. I.;' and the transition from the 'I. T.' to the 'You.' The writing looked like a skein of thread in a tangle, and the note was ingeniously folded into a perfect square, with the direction squeezed up into the right-hand corner, as if it were ashamed of itself. The back of the epistle was ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... she assented, with a smile. She kept him waiting with what would have looked like coquettish hesitation in another, while she glanced at the windows overhead, pierced by a skein of converging wires. "Suppose ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sexes, to whom, on examination of their heads, he would make revelations 'enabling him or her to know themselves.' Through all these bargains and blessings, the recruiting-sergeant watchfully elbowed his way, a thread of War in the peaceful skein. Likewise on the walls were printed hints that the Oxford Blues might not be indisposed to hear of a few fine active young men; and that whereas the standard of that distinguished corps is full six feet, 'growing lads of five feet eleven' need not ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... white spot on the wall, she said, half in a whisper: "There our cuckoo clock used to hang, and there our father's discharge from the army. And there the hanks of yarn that mother spun used to hang—she could spin even better than Black Marianne—Black Marianne has said so herself. She always got a skein more out of a pound than anybody else, and it was always so even—not a knot in it. And do you see that ring up there on the ceiling? It was beautiful to see her twisting the threads there. If I had been old enough to know ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... birthright of "genius," have ended where they began; flattered into the vain belief that they were men at eighteen or twenty, and finding out at fifty that they were and always had been nothing more than boys. It was but a tangled skein of life that Motley's book showed us at twenty-five, and older men might well have doubted whether it would ever be wound off in any continuous thread. To repeat his own words, he had crowded together the materials for his work, but ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... where so many of the Herren Maler go, and then there there is Herr Duntze, the landscape painter, and Herr Knoop who paints Genrebilder and does not make much by it—so a picture of a child with a raveled skein of wool, or a little girl making ear-rings for herself with bunches of cherries—for my part I don't see much in them, and wonder that there are people who will lay down good hard thalers for them. Then ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... high hilltop above the city, gazing across at Monte Rosa and lifting its own fine dome against the sky with no contemptible art. But when you have seen the Superga from the quay beside the Po, a skein of a few yellow threads in August, despite its frequent habit of rising high and running wild, and said to yourself that in architecture position is half the battle, you have nothing left to visit but the Museum of pictures. The Turin Gallery, which is large and well ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the thread of what we at present consider abnormal, through the whole skein of a single life, hoping thereby to encourage others to ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... sticks are best made of hickory, but ash or beech or any hard wood that can be worked smooth and which does not swell much when treated with water may be used. The usual method of working is to hang the skein on the stick, spreading it out as much as possible, then immerse the yarn in the liquor, lift it up and down two or three times to fully wet out the yarn, then turn the yarn over on the stick and repeat the dipping processes, then allow ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... the Silvia written by one Fileno, which, like the Amaranta, turns on the temporary estrangement of two lovers, introduces considerable elements from the rustic performances; in Cazza's Erbusto the amorous skein is cut by the discovery of consanguinity and an [Greek: a)nagno/risis] after the manner of the Latin comedy. Similar in plot to this last is a fragmentary pastoral of Giraldi Cintio's published from manuscript by Signor Carducci. Another curious but isolated experiment is Cintio's Egle, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... and that when thou didst go by chance to her, she was ready for thee. But if this is all she knows, it goes not far. Still it may help—it may help. In a tangled web, no one may say which will be the thread which patiently followed may unravel the skein." ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... of needlework amongst her ladies. In the days of her disgrace and solitude, Catherine turned to her embroidery for solace and occupation. She came forth to meet the Cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio with a skein of red silk round her neck.[603] Taylor, the ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... composed of a square frame with two vertical uprights and a horizontal bar. In its anterior portion was a cylinder, furnished with cables, which held back a great beam bearing a spoon for the reception of projectiles; its base was caught in a skein of twisted thread, and when the ropes were let go it sprang up and struck against the bar, which, checking it with a shock, multiplied ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... easy in that jumble of knots, among which twisted the liana in the middle of bromelias, "karatas," armed with their sharp prickles, orchids with rosy flowers and violet lips the size of gloves, and oncidiums more tangled than a skein of worsted ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... other half, which I hold in my hands at last, is finished off in the same way ... so I shall be able to see if it has a hiding-place too and what's inside it.... But look, my friend, isn't it cleverly made? And so simple! All you have to do is to take a skein of red cord and braid it round a wooden cup, leaving a little recess, a little empty space in the middle, very small, of course, but large enough to hold a medal of a saint ... or anything.... A precious stone, for instance.... ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... be not let into the memory, as too long not kept in. Whatsoever loseth the grace and clearness, converts into a riddle; the obscurity is marked, but not the value. That perisheth, and is passed by, like the pearl in the fable. Our style should be like a skein of silk, to be carried and found by the right thread, not ravelled and perplexed; then all is a knot, a heap. There are words that do as much raise a style as others can depress it. Superlation and over-muchness ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... silk. I was content to stay and finish the skein, though my remaining companion was in a humour too flighty to induce me to continue with him a moment longer. Indeed I had avoided pretty successfully all tte—tetes with him since the time when his eccentric genius led to such eccentric ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... and plain Hannah unrolled one heavy skein, threaded it through their own hoop, and lowered the two ends into the garden, where John stood at attention ready to throw them over the wall. Darsie and Lavender dropped their ends straight into the street, and then chased madly downstairs to join the boys ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... back from Paris utterly disgusted with life, sick with himself. Bitterly resentful against fate for creating such a tangled skein, and dangling happiness in front of him only to snatch it away again. He went up to Arranstoun and tried to play his part in the rejoicings at his return. He opened the house, engaged a full staff of servants, and ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... strong, hard thorn, sharp as a needle, and growing naturally in the form of a barb. Two dozen arrows for each constituted their initial equipment, but they cut a considerable quantity of spare reeds and thorns, and wound quite a large skein of silk to bind the barbed heads with, as they were quite prepared to lose several of their arrows at the outset, and accordingly made ample provision for their replacement, which could be done at odd moments, while working their way up the river. Their next business was to plait ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... justice be termed irrelevant. In the detours often lie invaluable data, for one with a mind for research—whether author or reader. This is especially true in connection with our present task, which involves unravelling some of the threads from the tangled skein of religion, dancing, music, sculpture and painting—that mass of bright and sombre colour, of gold and silver threads, strung with pearls and glittering gems strangely broken by age—which tells the epic-lyric tale ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... sat down with a skein of yellow silk on her hands, when Miss Assher said, graciously,—'I know you have an engagement with Captain Wybrow this morning. You must not let me ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... fantasy surprised her. After she had written it, it had seemed remote, all too white, a "Symphonie en Blanc Majeur"—as Theophile Gautier would have called it—besides devoid of human interest. But Arthur had interwoven a human strand of melody, a scarlet skein of emotion, primal withal, yet an attempt to catch the under emotions of the ice-bound Esquimaux surprised in their zone of silence by the sleep of the Shadow, the long night of their dreary winter. And the composer ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... told you something about Friar's Oak, and about the life that we led there. Now that my memory goes back to the old place it would gladly linger, for every thread which I draw from the skein of the past brings out half a dozen others that were entangled with it. I was in two minds when I began whether I had enough in me to make a book of, and now I know that I could write one about Friar's Oak alone, and the folk whom I knew in my childhood. They were hard and uncouth, some ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the red dress in my trunk, but they will meddle with my other things and look at Susie's blue dress, and then roll it up in such bad wrinkles," she said to herself. "Just like they will drop a skein of feather-stitching silk and tramp it with their feet till it is very dirty. Then some girl will pick it up to sew her doll clothes, and there will not be enough for ...
— Big and Little Sisters • Theodora R. Jenness
... he contributes little. It must be remembered that with the studies, while they completely exhibit the entire range of Chopin's genius, the play's the thing after all. The poetry, the passion of the Ballades and Scherzi wind throughout these technical problems like a flaming skein. With the modern avidity for exterior as well as interior analysis, Mikuli, Reinecke, Mertke and Scholtz evidence little sympathy. It is then from the masterly editing of Kullak, Von Bulow, Riemann and ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... Greenwich fixed prices at that time at rates which seem purely arbitrary and are certainly incomprehensible. Thus for spinning linen or worsted, five or six skeins to the pound, the price was not to exceed sixpence per skein of fifteen knots, with finer work in proportion. Carded woollen yarn was the same per skein. Weaving plain flannel or tow or linen brought fivepence per yard; common worsted and linen, one penny a yard; and other linens ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... were; they seemed to pierce the sky, That was an awful deep of empty blue, Save that the wind was in it, and on high A wavering skein of wild-fowl tracked it through. He marked them not, but went with movement slow, Because his thoughts were sad, his ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... of this loan is complicated by the fact that half of it was at the time alleged to have been placed in Paris, but it appears, as far as one can disentangle fact from the twisted skein of the report, that the Paris placing must have resulted much as did the first effort made in London, and that practically the whole of the bonds there issued came back into the hands of ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... similar purpose the bridegroom and his companions are often girt with pieces of net, or at least with tight-drawn girdles, for before a wizard can begin to injure them he must undo all the knots in the net, or take off the girdles. But often a Russian amulet is merely a knotted thread. A skein of red wool wound about the arms and legs is thought to ward off agues and fevers; and nine skeins, fastened round a child's neck, are deemed a preservative against scarlatina. In the Tver Government a bag of a special kind is tied to the neck ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... presume that arises from not knowing how to proceed. I have a skein to unravel, and cannot find out an ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... Alice, she felt herself more and more involved in the tangled skein of his mysterious life. His sudden and reckless abandonment of the old love which had ruined him, and the new and equally irrational regard which he now professed for her, filled her with a ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... this they began supper, which was already laid on a side-table. Ere they had finished there was a jerk in the fire-smoke, the rising skein of which bulged out into the room, as if some giant had laid his hand on the chimney-top for a moment. It had been caused by the opening of the outer door. A heavy step was now heard in the passage, and Angel ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... with her delicate features, her wealth of raven hair, above all, with the soft, sad, dreamy eyes, that look so loving, so trustful, and so good. In such characters as theirs these things are soon accomplished. A walk or two, a waltz, a skein of silk to wind, a drive in a pony-carriage, an afternoon church, and behold them in the memorable summer-house, where he won her heart—completely and unreservedly, while flinging down his own! Then came all the sweet excitement, ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... pillow, and to look at the clear night above the hills, and to listen to the very distant music, and to wonder whether or not, in this strange southern country, there might not be snakes gliding about in the undergrowth. Caught in such a skein of influence I was ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... into short threads, never more than half the length of the skein. If a long needleful is used, it is not only apt to pull the work, but is very wasteful, as the end of it is liable to become frayed or knotted before it is nearly worked up. If it is necessary to use it double (and for coarse ...
— Handbook of Embroidery • L. Higgin
... passage I confess that I imagined the conclusion was going to be very different from what it proved to be. Fresh from the study of the older men and also of Mr. Darwin himself, I failed to see that Mr. Darwin had "unravelled and illuminated" a tangled skein, but believed him, on the contrary, to have tangled and obscured what his predecessors had made in great part, if not wholly, plain. With the older writers, I had felt as though in the hands of men who wished to ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... sick of scrolls," said the Earl testily. "What! is it some order for saying mass,—or to get some new Popish image or a skein of silk? I wear my eyes out reading such as that, and racking my brains ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thick mop of fine, bright hair, rebellious like herself, of the sort that goes with an ardent personality, waved and curled over her little poll, and generally ended the day in a tangle only less intricate than can be achieved by a skein of silk. Of her small oval face, people were accustomed to say it was all eyes, an unoriginal summarising, but one that forced itself inevitably upon those who met Christian's eyes, clear and shining, of the pale brown that the sun knows how to waken in a ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... eight care heir obey weight bare their prey freight fare there weigh neigh hair where sleigh veins fair stair reign whey chair pear skein rein pair ...
— How to Teach Phonics • Lida M. Williams
... doing laborious work, it was customary with The Lifter, as well as with our hero, to sit among the women and assist them in such offices as the peeling of turnips or potatoes; and holding the yarn skein whilst one of the women rolled the thread into a ball; or in scouring the knives and forks. One afternoon while all the men save The Lifter were absent, the group was seated round a small open fire. Hanging from the crane was a pot ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... about Mr. Falconer—that it was her house he had rented for his friend, etc. But everything about the matter was so indefinite. She was fearful of exposing her unhappy heart, and she had withal some vague hope of unsnarling the tangled skein when she should find opportunity to think. So she allowed them to finish up their discussion and to leave the room without a hint of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... receptacle. The materials needed are three-quarters of a yard of pale-brown Turkish toweling, six yards of red worsted braid, four steel rings (to hold the strings), one-eighth of a yard each of blue, white, and scarlet cashmere, a skein each of blue, red, green, yellow, and black worsted, and a small red ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... in this country for specifying the size of silk is based on the weight in drams (avoirdupois) of a skein containing 1000 yards. A skein, thus weighing 5 drams, is technically called 5-dram silk. The number of yards of 1-dram silk to a pound must accordingly be 256000. The formulas for figuring the amount of silk required for a piece of ...
— Theory Of Silk Weaving • Arnold Wolfensberger
... I sat on a rug, with a scrap of buckskin in one hand and an awl in the other. This was the beginning of my practical observation lessons in the art of beadwork. From a skein of finely twisted threads of silvery sinews my mother pulled out a single one. With an awl she pierced the buckskin, and skillfully threaded it with the white sinew. Picking up the tiny beads one by one, she strung them with the point of her thread, always twisting ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... chances for humor, particularly the funny story, for humor with a genuine point is not trivial. But do not spin a whole skein of humorous yarns with no more connection than the inane and threadbare "And that reminds me." An anecdote without bearing may be funny but one less funny that fits theme and occasion is far preferable. There is no way, short of sheer power of speech, that so surely ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... this moment is hidden from us by a band of clouds, that stretches, right above our head, from one end of the sky to the other, like a long skein of white wool. It is alone in the blue void, and seems to make more peaceful, and even a little mysterious, the wonderful light of the fields we traverse—these fields intoxicated with life and vibrant ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... skein of silk, 'The ravelled sleave of care', usually misinterpreted, the equivocal ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... in the hen-house, And no one at home in the barn, Old Brindle has gone to the neighbor's To borrow a skein of brown yarn, To borrow yarn for the darning Of socks for her ...
— The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes • Leroy F. Jackson
... searching the southern wilderness with frowning, bloodshot eyes, and once more, far to the east where the jagged cliffs of the Superstitions sweep down to the gorge of the Salagua and Hell's Hip Pocket bars the river's sweep, he saw that vague, impalpable haze—a smoke, a dust, a veil of the lightest skein, stirred idly by some wandering wind, perhaps, or marking the trail of sheep. And as he looked upon it his melancholy gaze changed to a staring, hawk-like intentness; he leaned forward in the saddle and Chapuli stepped eagerly down the slope, head up, as if he sniffed ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... top of the 'bus, I bite my pipe and look at the sky. Over my shoulder the smoke streams out And my life with it. "Conservation of energy," you say. But I burn, I tell you, I burn; And the smoke of me streams out In a vanishing skein of grey. Crash and bump ... my poor bruised body! I am a harp of twittering strings, An elegant instrument, but infinitely second-hand, And if I have not got phthisis it is ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... were a loose skein of threads, And tangled emotions, vague and dim; And sacrificing what he loved He lost the ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... high forehead, he heard—or thought he heard despite the jar of the street—the rustle of the muslin robe. Hermione passed, nor ever knew how, by taking this way from the house of a friend, she coloured the skein of life for three mortals—for herself, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... at all," said Oldbuck, resuming the subject of his disquisition"the human mind is to be treated like a skein of ravelled silk, where you must cautiously secure one free end before you can make ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... and crowbars— Now they prick pins at a tissue Fine as a skein of the casuist Escobar's Worked on the bone of a lie. To what issue? Where is our ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... this from the past. Strange to say, although he could remember the telling of these things, he could only remember weak, confused snatches of what he told. It was unaccountable—but there!—he could not try to unravel that skein now. He must settle, and promptly, whether to speak to ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... be reduced to a t-sound in vocalization. But even if the sound of t is given at the termination of the words named, not much is gained by the "reform" in the actual use of the words. On the contrary, it adds another tangle in the skein which children at school must untangle. It either forms another class of regular verbs, or swells the already almost unmanageable list of irregular verbs. In either case it is shifting the burden from the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... those cases which make a judge congratulate himself on the existence of trial by jury. It is one of those peculiarly difficult cases in which the mind is perplexed between its desire to mete out punishment for a singularly atrocious crime, and its inability to disentangle the knotted skein of mystery which shrouds the whole circumstances of the affair. I rejoice unaffectedly that the responsibility of discharging this delicate and dangerous task is thrown not upon my shoulders, ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... would she be able to swing herself aloft to the mercy of Heaven, till she had recovered this other half, which was now held fast in the deep water. Anne Lisbeth got back to her former home, but was no longer the woman she had been: her thoughts were confused like a tangled skein; only one thread, only one thought she had disentangled, namely, that she must carry the spectre of the sea shore to the churchyard, and dig a grave for him, that thus she might ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... light enough to blind her, and was only winding a skein, and could see better to do that in the dark. So Mrs. Carbery passed on to her second piece of news, which, though less tragical than the first, was not likely to sound very cheerfully in the ears of some among her audience. It ran that her son Ned was ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... was absent-minded, for his thoughts were working, and already he was beginning to tie the broken threads of the skein that he had gathered into a rough cord, with here and there a gap that must—and should—be filled. It was strange enough, in all conscience. Here were these underground tunnels leading, "if you kept to the ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... Rose King still abroad in Burgundy?' And as Sir Giles replied to each inquiry in turn, and told all he could of political matters, she exclaimed: 'Ah! that is better than the hearing whether the black hen hath laid an egg, or the skein of yellow silk matches. I am weary, O! I am weary. Moreover, young Hal, I know as matters are that could I see George Nevil face to face I could do somewhat with him, and I laid my plans to obtain a meeting, but ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the time,' he says, in winding up that knotted skein of prophecy, which he leaves for Merlin to disentangle, for 'he lives before his time,' as he takes that opportunity to ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... Toffey imported, for Costuming, shawls, crepe at $1 per yard, silk, skein-silk, twist, ribbon, velvet at 90c. per yard, drab-cloth, flannel, braid, handkerchiefs, buttons and button-moulds, gloves, suspenders, calico, vest patterns, pins, chrome-yellow, "bearskin" at 82c. per yard, ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... asked, pointing up to a network like a skein of silk twisted in a hundred zigzags across the face of the mountain from bottom to top. "Why, it's like the way up Jack's beanstalk. No sane ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... ever there such a sight in the world? Like a wonderful winding skein,— The way he tangles them up together ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... stand the trees, Shadowy, whispering immensities, That rain down quietude and darkness on heart and eye. None move, none speak, none sigh But from the laurels comes a leaping voice Crying in tones that seem not man's nor boy's, But only joy's, And hard behind a loud tumultuous crying, A tangled skein of noise, And the girls see their lovers come, each vying Against the next in glad and confident poise, Or softly moving To the side of the chosen with gentle words and loving Gifts for her pleasure of sweetmeats and ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... as I thought I did about the bigness of London, I found that morning that I never had any idea of what an everlasting town it is. It is like a skein of tangled yarn—there doesn't seem to be any end to it. Going in this way from Nelson's Monument out into the country, it was amazing to see how long it took to get there. We would go out of the busy streets into a quiet rural neighborhood, or what looked like it, and the next thing ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... or some other festive season, you may have to dress a fowl or turkey for your dinner. On such occasions I would recommend the following method:—First, draw the fowl, reserving the gizzard and liver to be tucked under the wings; truss the fowl with skewers, and tie it to the end of a skein of worsted, which is to be fastened to a nail stuck in the chimney-piece, so that the fowl may dangle rather close to the fire, in order to roast it. Baste the fowl, while it is being roasted, with butter, or some kind of grease, and when ...
— A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes • Charles Elme Francatelli
... no right conception of Washington that does not accord him a great and extraordinary genius. I will not say he could have produced a play of Shakespeare, or a poem of Milton, handled with Kant the tangled skein of metaphysics, probed the secrecies of mind and matter with Bacon, constructed a railroad or an engine like Stephenson, wooed the electric spark from heaven to earth with Franklin, or walked with Newton the pathways of the spheres. But if his genius were of a different order, it was ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... when, with her aunt, she arrived at Colonel Hetherton's and found the family assembled upon the broad piazza, the doctor dutifully holding the skein of worsted from which Miss Fanny was crocheting, and Lucy playing with a kitten, whose movements were scarcely more graceful than her own, as she sprang up ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... she related all the particulars of her ill-omened vision to her husband; and the latter, after a short pause, informed her and his friend that a terrible calamity was about to befall them. He then drew from his travelling wallet a skein of thread. This he divided into three parts, one for each, and told his companions that in case of grievous bodily injury, the bit of thread wound round the wounded part would instantly make it whole. After which he taught ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... and fell, where lies the Gain Of Knowledge? Would it ease you of your Pain To know the tangled Threads of Revenue, I ravel deeper in a hopeless Skein? ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... think that there is nothing on it,' answered she, 'but I can assure you that there is a large skein of wool, so fine that nobody can see it, which will be woven into a ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... skein o' worsted stretched out on her hands," Sanders continued, "and a young leddy was winding it. I didna see her richt, but ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... feet. Wonderful birds and butterflies were darting hither and thither amongst the loveliest flowers. And on a grassy nook not far from a waterfall he perceived some white marble steps on which two little girls sat. The one was holding a great skein of wool, and the other was winding it. There was a great heap of wool of all colours on ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... to unravel the tangled skein of crime and hypocrisy among individuals can it be extended to communities and nations, as nations are only man in the aggregate, they are the aggregate of his crimes and deception and depravity, and so long as these constitute the basis of individual ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... On the other hand, we can seldom look for any laborious work of authorship from a general in active service. Men of action exhaust their energies in doing, and are usually impatient of the slow process of unwinding the tangled skein of events which at the moment they had been compelled to cut with the sword. It is by no means every campaign which furnishes the Commentaries of its Caesar. To Sir William Napier, however, we are indebted for a work which has taken its place as a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... what ails thee?" said Cleopatra, smiling her slow smile. "Has the golden skein of stars got tangled, my astronomer? or dost thou plan some new feat of magic? Say what is it that thou dost so poorly grace our feast? Nay, now, did I not know, having made inquiry, that things so low as we poor women are ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... These passing tourists would have thought it stranger still, could they have known how fate had been tangling the life threads of these people who were in such earnest conversation, or how it had wound them together into a queer skein of happenings. ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... relate how it was in their childhood, Praising the good old times, and the days of Priscilla the spinner!" Straight uprose from her wheel the beautiful Puritan maiden, Pleased with the praise of her thrift from him whose praise was the sweetest, Drew from the reel on the table a snowy skein of her spinning, Thus making answer, meanwhile, to the flattering phrases of Alden: "Come, you must not be idle; if I am a pattern for housewives, Show yourself equally worthy of being the model of husbands. Hold this skein on your hands, while I wind it, ready for knitting; Then who ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... analyst, That canst each property detect Of mood or grain, that canst untwist Each tangled skein of intellect, And with thy scalpel eyes lay bare 40 Each mental nerve more fine than air,— O brain exact, that in thy scales Canst weigh the sun and never err, For once thy patient science fails, One problem still defies ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... easiest thing I have been set to do,' thought the girl, who was a good spinner. But when she began she found that the skein tangled and broke ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... fashion had Audrey Ross solved the Gordian knot of family difficulty, leaving her mother and sister eyeing each other with the aghast looks of defeated conspirators; and it must be owned that many a tangled skein, that would have been patiently and laboriously unravelled by the skilled fingers of Geraldine, was spoilt in this manner by the quick impulsiveness ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... did to recommend himself when he was there; he generally sat watching Diana, carrying on a spasmodic and interrupted conversation with Mrs. Starling about farm affairs, and seizing the opportunity of a dropped spool or an unwound skein of yarn to draw near Diana and venture some word to her. Poor Diana felt in those days so much like a person whose earthly ties are all broken, that it did not come into her head in what a different light she stood ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... as the one best eating bet in Munich—and not forgetting, by any means, the Luitpold, the Rathaus, the Odeon and all the other gilded hells of victualry to northward. Imagine it: every skein of sauerkraut is cooked three times before it reaches your plate! Once in plain water, once in Rhine wine and once in melted snow! A dish, in this benighted republic, for stevedores and yodlers, a coarse fee for violoncellists, ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... his religious experiences, he has his axioms, his common-sense formulas, his irreproachable coolness, and, at times, a noisy show of distrust, under which it is easy to see an eager groping after the ends of that great tangled skein of thought ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... the ancients gave up the exploration of the Nile when they came to the countless windings and difficulties of the marshes; the river is like an entangled skein of thread. Wind light; course S. 20 degrees W. The strong north wind that took us from Khartoum has long since become a mere breath. It never blows in this latitude regularly from the north. The wind commences at between 8 and 9 A.M., and sinks at sunset; thus the voyage through ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... murmur of the human heart drifted in and out of McLean's hearing; fragments of home talk, tendernesses, economies, intimate first names, and dinner hours, and whether it was joy or sadness, it was in common; the world seemed knit in a single skein of home ties. Two or three came by whose purses must have been slender, and whose purchases were humble and chosen after much nice adjustment; and when one plain man dropped a word about both ends meeting, and the woman with him laid a hand on his arm, saying that his children ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... himself it simply flabbergasted the poor man; and even the exceptionally clever and energetic secretary to whom he deputed the making of an abstract of the same very nearly lost his reason with the strain of attempting to lay hold of the tangled end of the skein. It happened that just at that time the Prince had several other important affairs on hand, and affairs of a very unpleasant nature. That is to say, famine had made its appearance in one portion of the province, and the tchinovniks sent ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... paper will convince us of the weakness of the other. Decay appears to have seized on the organ of popular government in every land; and this just at the moment when we begin to bring to it, as to an oracle of justice, the whole skein of our private affairs to be unravelled, and ask it, like a new Messiah, to take upon itself our frailties and play for us the part that should be played by our own virtues. For that, in few words, is ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the room to put on her things, upsetting as she did so, the work-box with which she had been masquerading, and quite unconscious of it. Winnington, smiling to himself, stooped to pick up the reels and skeins of silk. One, a skein of pink silk with which she had been working, he held in his hand a moment, and, suddenly, put in his pocket. After which he drifted absently to the hearthrug, and stood waiting for her, hat in hand. He was thinking of that moment in the wintry ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Thread lost, disposed in Order all. Oh for the Noble Nature, and Clear Heart, That, seeing Two who draw one Breath together Drinking the Cup of Happiness and Tears Unshatter'd by the Stone of Separation, Is loath their sweet Communion to destroy, Or cast a Tangle in the Skein of Joy. ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... up a skein of silk that had slipped to the floor, but finding her eyes upon him gave ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... picked up some leaders. We have a tangled skein to unravel, and we have got to do some pretty smart work. Those men are good ones; we are guarded at every point, and yet we have made a big stride toward a grand close-in some day, but our chance may come in some months ...
— Cad Metti, The Female Detective Strategist - Dudie Dunne Again in the Field • Harlan Page Halsey
... such a good creature!" exclaimed Louis, in his energy letting fall one end of a skein of silk he was holding. He gathered it up, apologized, and resumed his defence ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... like bubbles in Gruyere cheese, have been occupied consecutively to the present day. Opposite to Les Eyzies, hanging like a net or skein of black thread to the face of the precipice, is a hotel, part gallery, part cave—l'Auberge du Paradis; and a notice in large capitals invites the visitor to ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... skein of silk, and, extending it to M. de Bois, she said: "Will you assist me? It is for Bertha I am working. Will you hold this ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... but once or twice, when the others were gone, the children to the street, Melchior about his business, she asked her eldest son to stay to do her some small service. Jean-Christophe would hold her skein while she unwound it. Suddenly she would throw everything away, and draw him passionately to her. She would take him on her knees, although he was quite heavy, and would hug and hug him. He would fling his arms round her neck, and the two ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... furnish details which should render these reflections more striking, would require an unravelling of the whole tangled skein of history ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... which in any progressive community the people must decide for themselves. However near to the appearances such an impression might be, nothing could be further from the facts. If I have helped the reader to unravel the tangled skein of our national life, if I have sufficiently revealed the mind of the new movement to show that there is in it 'a scheme of things entire,' it should be quite clear that the deliberate intentions both of Mr. Gerald Balfour and of those Irishmen whom he took into his ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... It cut "more often" short. It is probable, that had it not been for this, the prioress and Fauchelevent would never have unravelled that skein. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... sea-divided lands, And slowly, thread by thread, Draw forth the folded strands, Than which the trembling line, By whose frail help yon startled spider fled Down the tall spear-grass from his swinging bed, Is scarce more fine; And as the tangled skein Unravels in my hands, Betwixt me and the noonday light, A veil seems lifted, and for miles and miles The landscape broadens on my sight, As, in the little boll, there lurked a spell Like that which, in the ocean shell, With mystic sound, Breaks down the narrow walls that hem us round, And ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... loom of the cotton-plant, poet that can show us the sky, painter that paints it, artisan that reaches out, and, from the skein of a sunbeam, the loom of the air and the white of its own soul, weaves the cloth that clothes ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... "Three yards more would finish, and now I shall have to go down to the village and buy a whole skein, just ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... of this sad letter were almost illegible in their faintness and irregularity; and the tangled skein of light scratches that stood proxy for a signature could never have been deciphered by ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... enough that you should have made the offer,' replied the old woman; and she added, holding out a skein of thread, 'Take this; one day you will be thankful for it, and when it becomes useless ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... got me to holdin' a skein of yarn for her. As Old Hickory strolls by and sees me with my hands stuck out, I thought he was goin' to ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford |
