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More "Drone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as we read in ancient sages, Have been like cobwebs in all ages: Cobwebs for little flies are spread, And laws for little folks are made; But if an insect of renown, Hornet or beetle, wasp or drone, Be caught in quest of sport or plunder, The flimsy fetter flies in sunder. Your simile perhaps may please one With whom wit holds the place of reason: 10 But can you prove that this in fact is Agreeable to life and practice? Then hear, what in his simple way Old AEsop ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... and the next instant was whirling down the thoroughfare with the rapidity of an express train, bawling for people to "Stand clear!" In another moment he was out of sight, in a cloud of dust, and his yells fell to a drone ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... she said, slowly, "until father and mother went away I had been the lazy one of the family, the good-for-nothing—the drone—and I've not yet learned to work in the quiet way my sister does, which accomplishes so much without any fuss. Now that she can get about again she does twice as much as I do, but she doesn't make such a clatter of tools, and doesn't get the credit for being ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... The drone of the engine having died away down the avenue, I presently found myself alone, but as I crossed the hall in the direction of the library, intending to walk out upon the southern lawns, I saw Val Beverley coming toward me from Madame de ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... the year, but the warmth was as that of a soft summer day in England. The lazy drone of bees hung on the air, and somewhere among the tamarisks a small, persistent bird, called and called ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... rooms and all cosey. Octavia was in there—the dining-room—helping to lay the cloth, as she had been rather clumsy, too, and been sent away, and her young man was as nice as mine; and we four had a superb time, as happy as children, but Tom was nothing but a drone, for he sat with Kitty in a window seat behind some curtains, and did not do ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... plants grew in glorious profusion, the air was odorous with a thousand scents, and it was hard for them to realize that at that very moment America might be suffering from zero weather or swept by blizzards. Here life moved along serenely and dreamily, lulled by the sound of birds and drone of locusts, wrapped in the ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... the drone-pipes is heard, and Montfleury enters, enormously stout, in an Arcadian shepherd's dress, a hat wreathed with roses drooping over one ear, blowing into ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... sister of his, everybody in the farmhouse treated him as a beggar who is eating the bread of strangers. At every meal the very food he swallowed was made a subject of reproach against him; he was called a drone, a clown, and although his brother-in-law had taken possession of his portion of the inheritance, he was helped grudgingly to soup, getting just enough to ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... I didn't sleep much last night, and when I did I dreamed like fun. See here, you tell the people that I know, and it's all right, and I don't want them to talk about it or howl over me. That's all; now drone away, and I'll try to sleep. Wish I could for a year, and ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... for thee, when the rays are now full, Do the oaks form an evergreen glade; While the drone of the locust overhead, seemed to lull The cattle that rest in ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... drowsy, hazy days of so-called Indian Summer. It was the season of threshing, and all day long to the drowse of the air was added, near and afar, all-pervading through the stillness, the sleepy hum of the separator. Typical voice of the prairie was that busy drone, penetrating to the ears as the ubiquitous odor of the buffalo grass to the nostril, again bearing resemblance in that, once heard, memory would reproduce the sound until ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... wilderness—the little night sounds to which she had grown accustomed: the bellowing of frogs in the sedges, the chirp of tree-toads, and the harsh squawk of startled night-fowls. Even the air seemed unnaturally still, and the ceaseless drone of the mosquitoes served but to intensify the unnatural silence. The mosquitoes broke the spell of the nameless terror, and she slapped viciously at her ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... sovereign then had to endure a long and grave discourse from a fat drone bee who did not ...
— Piccolissima • Eliza Lee Follen
... I slept a little as my custom is, and the last sound that I heard, and the first upon awaking, was the drone of the bees. When I awakened I thought that I would walk down to Master Richard's house and see how all fared. So I took my staff ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... Mexico, whereof Cuba and Hispaniola are thoughte to be very nere as bigge as England and Ireland, wee reade not of past twoo or three places well fortified, as Sancto Domingo in Hispaniola, and Havana in Cuba. I may therefore conclude this matter with comparinge the Spaniardes unto a drone, or an emptie vessell, which when it is smitten upon yeldeth a greate and terrible sound, and that afarr of; but come nere and looke into them, there ys nothinge in them; or rather like unto the asse which wrapte himselfe in a lyons skynne, and marched farr of to strike terror in the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... bridge so crowded we could hardly get through, made a never-to-be-forgotten picture. It was just a holiday canoe-meet, and hundreds of the small, frail craft were darting about upon the surface of the water like so many pretty dragon-flies. The automobile seemed such an intrusion, a drone of prose in a burst of poetry, the discord of machinery in a ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... association of ideas, lie to the popular fancy, might be illustrated by scores of examples. Thoughts of religious functions arise in us the moment we hear the trombones intone a solemn phrase in full harmony; an oboe melody in sixth-eighth time over a drone bass brings up a pastoral picture of a shepherd playing upon his pipe; trumpets and drums suggest war, and so on. The delineation of movement is easier to the musician than it is to the poet. Handel, who has conveyed the sensation of a "darkness which might be felt," in a chorus of ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... outskirts of the village a mill-wheel droned lazily as the boys swung at scout's stride down the road. Suddenly the drone died away, and by the time the comrades were abreast of the quaint old wooden water-mill the wheel was still, and ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... of the propeller—like the drone of a giant locust—resounded over the town, people came pouring out from houses and shops to witness the descent. The crowd gathered so quickly that Peggy had difficulty to avoid hitting some of them. However, she managed to bring the aeroplane to a standstill ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... we rose, receiving immediately after the nine ounces of bread and pint of oatmeal gruel which composed breakfast. At 6.30, to chapel to hear one of the schoolmasters drone through the morning prayers of the English Church service, and listen to some hymn shouted out from throats never accustomed to such accents. Then the morning hours would drag slowly on in the Summer's sun and Winter's blast until the noon hour; then there was the long march back ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... darkness—and our drive, together. . . . You are quite right not to talk to me; I won't, either. . . . Only I'll drone on and on from time to time—so that you won't forget that I am ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... cherries were ripe, and he stood for a moment under the tree, staring disconsolately at the distant blue ridges shimmering through the heated air. The sunlight was motionless, languid; it seemed asleep. The drowsy drone of insects filled the forest. As Si threw himself down to rest on the rocky brink of the mountain, a grasshopper sprang away suddenly, high into the air, with an agility that suggested to him the chorus of a song, which he began to sing in ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... railways in our back area. Arras was often severely bombed. The German aeroplanes on any fine night came to be regarded as inevitable. Bombing might be continued until nearly dawn. When no bombs fell close there was always the constant drone announcing their possibility. To men in huts or in the open, without lights or any means of shelter, the terror carried nightly overhead was greater far than that which ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... that the room began to waver and spin about Dorothy Thornton, until with the drone of the hired man's voice diminishing in her ears she fell swooning, and ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... glance up, and all the school glanced with her. The drone of the reader hushed. The door opened softly, and upon the threshold stood Zora. Her small feet and slender ankles were black and bare; her dark, round, and broad-browed head and strangely beautiful face were poised almost defiantly, crowned with a misty ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... delight, And with the high-risen moon came pensive thought, And men in love's despite must grow distraught And loiter in the dance, and maidens drop Their gathered raiment, and the fifer stop His dancing notes the pensive drone that chid, And as they wander to their dwellings, hid By the black shadowed trees, faint melody, Mournful and sweet, their soft good-night must be. Far better spoil the gathering vat bore in Unto the pressing shed, than midst the ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... feather-wrought mantles, their heads dressed with white plumes, a staff of cane adorned with white feathers in the right hand, a green bough in the left, preceded by those curiously sonorous earthen drums, of which the drone blended with the notes of the religious song, Yo-he-wah-yah! Yo-he-wah-yah! they thrice led the glittering procession of the "holy dance" around and around ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... widows' bridegrooms, full of doubt and fear: They judge, from the experience of the dame, How hard a task it is to quench her flame; And who falls short of furnishing a course Up to his brawny predecessor's force, With utmost rage from her embraces thrown, Remains convicted as an empty drone. Thus often, to his shame, a pert beginner Proves in the end a miserable sinner. As for our youngster, I am apt to doubt him, With all the vigour of his youth about him; But he, more sanguine, trusts in one and twenty, And impudently hopes he shall content you: For though his bachelor ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... Charlie, but Rose cut him short by saying as reproachfully as she could, while the culprit stood regarding her with placid satisfaction: "You ought to have been up and at work like the rest of the boys. I felt like a drone in a hive of very busy bees when I saw them all ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... say horrible, as he recalled one of his pet abominations, a dirty, kilted and plaided Scotchman, who made night hideous about the Bloomsbury squares with his chanter and drone. ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... the want of power in the Government to compromise and release the demand instigates to fraud as the only resource for securing a support to his family. He thus sinks into a state of apathy, and becomes a useless drone in society or a vicious member of it, if not a feeling witness of the rigor and inhumanity of his country. All experience proves that oppressive debt is the bane of enterprise, and it should be the care of a republic not to exert a grinding ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... much need of thee: Thou art no sabbath-drawler of old saws, Distill'd from some worm-canker'd homily; But spurr'd at heart with fiercest energy To embattail and to wall about thy cause With iron-worded proof, hating to hark The humming of the drowsy pulpit-drone Half God's good Sabbath, while the worn-out clerk Brow-beats ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... is derived from Turkish beg armudi, prince's pear. With beg, prince, cf. bey and begum. The burden of a song is from Fr. bourdon, "a drone, or dorre-bee; also, the humming, or buzzing, of bees; also, the drone of a bag-pipe" (Cotgrave). It is of doubtful origin, but is not related to burden, a load, which is connected with ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... fizzled, and the air churned steadily, whoo! whoo! whoo! between their poles. One was loose in its foundations and kept the shed vibrating. But the big dynamo drowned these little noises altogether with the sustained drone of its iron core, which somehow set part of the ironwork humming. The place made the visitor's head reel with the throb, throb, throb of the engines, the rotation of the big wheels, the spinning ball-valves, the occasional ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... good to have things happen, Bat," Standing went on presently. "Hark at the roar of the falls. What is it? Five hundred thousand horsepower of water, summer and winter. Listen to the drone of the grinders." He shook his head. "It's a great song, boy, and they never get tired of singing it. There's only thirty-six of 'em at present. Thirty-six. We'll have a hundred and thirty-six some day. Look down there at the booms." He stood ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... He is a great drone, for he prefers the chimney-corner to the field, even although it cannot have been very cold if the weather was open enough to admit of ploughing. And he is a great fool, too, for he buys his comfort at a very dear price, as do all ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... said the fool, thinking. "Since Eve fell into sin, women's counsel is often the best. You, Nunkey, shall be turned into a butterfly, and not into a drone, and grace the flowers as ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... chac-chac, if music it can be called. Some power over the emotions it must have; for the Negroes are said to be gradually maddened by it; and white people have told me that its very monotony, if listened to long, is strangely exciting, like the monotony of a bagpipe drone, or of a drum. What more went on at the dance we could not see; and if we had tried, we should probably not have been allowed to see. The Negro is chary of admitting white men to his amusements; and no wonder. If ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... birds in a cloud fly up From their sweet feeding in the fruit; The droning of the bees and flies Rises gradual as a lute; Is it for fear the birds are flown, And shrills the insect-drone? ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... song the moan Of the dove that grieves alone, And the wild whir of the locust, and the bumble's drowsy drone; And the low of cows that call Through the pasture-bars when all The landscape fades away ...
— Riley Farm-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... a young man had charge of the meeting, and he stood, with a sort of embarrassed dignity, on the little platform behind the desk. He was reading a selection from the Bible. Maria heard him drone out in a scarcely audible voice: "Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth," and then she heard, in a quick response, a soft sob from the seat behind her. She knew who sobbed: Mrs. Jasper Cone, who had lost ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and there was a patch of vivid emerald where the water fell. To the north it was possible to make out the arms of a semaphore lying idle. There was no sound in the place. The river itself flowed silently. Only the occasional deep drone of a hornet or the note of a mosquito came to the ear. The sun seemed to be drawing the land together, sucking up ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... time and again. Do not think me insincere when I assure you they were the most delightful ones I ever passed. If you find time to write a line to one who is now a worker in the hive instead of a drone, it will be ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... Tzigane band was no longer heard—only the horses' muffled footfalls and the intermittent chromatic drone of hidden distant tram-cars. She shivered and shaded her face with her fan. There was something remote from humanity in his speech. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... are men. There are thousands of them. The U. P. R. goes on. It can't be stopped. It has the momentum of a great nation pushing it on from behind.... And I, who have lost all I cared for, and you, who are a drone among the bees, and Ruby and Stanton with their kind, poor creatures sucked into the vortex; yes, and that mob of leeches, why we all are so stung by that nameless spirit that we are stirred beyond ourselves and dare both height ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... things we could spare; we could watch without weeping A Tutor's extinction, a Dean's disappearance. And Professors who drone while their pupils are sleeping, Though they went at a loss, we should ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... did my Graunie summon, To say her prayers, douce, honest woman! Aft yont the dyke she's heard you bummin, Wi' eerie drone; Or, rustlin, thro' the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... it was not altogether the fault of the minister that Shenac fell asleep, though his voice was a drowsy drone to many a one besides her. The week's activity was quite sufficient to account for her drowsiness, to say nothing of the bright sunshine streaming in through ten uncurtained windows, and the air growing heavy with the breathing of a multitude. Shenac ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... sometimes think of going to Norwich, for I should have very much liked it, but it has been quite out of the question. We have been here for five weeks for a change, and it has done me some little good; but I have been forced to live the life of a drone, and for a month before leaving home I was unable to do anything and ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... unabated. But as the harvest ripens beneath the long, hot days, the melody gradually ceases. The young are out of the nest and must be cared for, and the moulting season is at hand. After the cricket has commenced to drone his monotonous refrain beneath your window, you will not, till another season, hear the wood thrush in all his matchless eloquence. The bobolink has become careworn and fretful, and blurts out snatches of ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... in the Valley of the Mills; and in some of them lights were burning; and the drone of the mill-stones, where the women were still grinding, came out into the night like the humming of drowsy bees. As the women heard the pattering and bleating of the flock, they wondered who was passing so late. One of them, in a house where there was no mill but many lights, ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... beside a river on a golden afternoon listening to its whispered melody, while the air about one is fragrant with summer, and heavy with the drone of unseen wings!—What ordinary mortal could wish for more? And yet, though conscious of this fair world about me, I was still uncontent, for my world was incomplete—nay, lacked its most essential ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... pleasure and satisfaction to the little polishers. 'Have you done your work?' was the question addressed to a visitor by a three-year-old child, and the visitor beat a hasty retreat, ashamed perhaps of being the only drone in the busy hive. At dinner time four children wait on the rest, and very well and quickly the food is handed round ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... winged flash, goes by; And tawny wasp and hornet Seem gleams that drone; The beetle, like a garnet, Slips from the stone; And butterflies float there, Spangling with gold ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... always scratched the enemy's skin. The painter knew more about fencing than art. He was a champion with various weapons; he could box, and was even skilled in the favorite blows of the prize fighters of the slums. "Useless as a drone, and as dangerous, too," fretted his father. And yet in the back of his troubled mind fluttered an irresistible satisfaction—an animal pride in the thought that this hare-brained terror was ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... continuance. Swelling up of the puffy form, and reddening ripples of the broad face heralded it, it began with a contagious cackle, it deepened into a flabby guffaw, and after all the others roundabout had finished their cachinnatory tribute it wound up with what was between a roar and the lazy drone of a bagpipe. ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... fifty-five. Georgius Secundus was then alive,— Snuffy old drone from the German hive. That was the year when Lisbon-town Saw the earth open and gulp her down, And Braddock's army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. It was on the terrible Earthquake-day That the Deacon ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... that when with his Lass, } He's Knave in Grain; a Blockhead and an Ass. } Because a Cuckold's Life was his hard fate, Must Wedlock be abused at this rate? Because he had a strumpit for his Wife, He now commends a mopish single Life. Let him content himself to live a Drone, In some dark Corner of the World alone; And trouble not his Brains with our blest State, Which now is far above his wretched fate; He talks of prayers a little while before, And then he curss'd his Wife and call'd ...
— The Pleasures of a Single Life, or, The Miseries Of Matrimony • Anonymous
... friendship. Thus was man formed for social and active life, the noblest part of the work of God; and he, who will so demean himself as not to be endeavoring to add to the common stock of knowledge and understanding, may be deemed a DRONE in the HIVE of nature, a useless member of society, and unworthy of our protection as Masons. The BOOK OF CONSTITUTIONS, GUARDED BY THE TYLER'S SWORD, reminds us that we should be ever watchful and guarded, in our thoughts, words, and actions, and particularly when before the enemies ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... handicraftsman, journeyman, mechanic, workman, laborer, operative, industrial. Antonyms: idler, drone, dabbler, sluggard, truant, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... they are men of action and therefore have no need of books; that they are "the flat-bottoms who can ride over the dew." Though they are a little breezier, they are of the same bone and marrow as the drone who is always counseling halfspeed. "Don't sweat; just get by; extra work means short life; you're better off if they don't notice you." This chant can be heard by anyone who cares to listen; it's the old ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... well, thanks, and how is Mrs....?" "When can I see you to-morrow?" "I'll take your offer for those bonds." ... And I could see the interiors of innumerable offices and drawing-rooms.... But of course I could hear and see nothing really except the intent drone and quick gesturing of those completely absorbed young creatures in the dim radiance, on stools ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... back as well as two keys, was known as the dulceian, dolcian, doucaine, and also in France as courtaud and in England as the curtail, curtal,[15] curtoll, &c., being mentioned in 1582—"The common bleting musick of ye Drone, Hobius (Hautboy) and Curtoll." The next step in the evolution produced the double curtail, a converted bass pommer an octave below the single curtail and therefore identical in pitch as in construction with the early fagotto ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... times did the Tonneraire thus prove herself a crack ship. A crack ship with a crack crew and officers, remember; for the best of ships is but a drone unless well managed. Not even a drone, indeed; for a drone is a most duty-full bee, and a most respectable member of the apiarian republic. There is a vast deal of very indifferent music in the very best of fiddles, and I feel quite convinced that ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... thus, perchance two or three, straining every sense, when a sound brought me to a stand. At first I could not distinguish it because of my heavy breathing, but presently I made sure that it was the low drone of human voices. Getting down on my hands and knees, I crept forward, and felt the ground rising. The voices had ceased. I gained the crest of a low ridge, and threw myself flat. A rattle of musketry set me shivering, and in an agony of fright ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... The Queen Mother often lays as many as two thousand eggs in a day. Most of these are Worker eggs, and are laid in the small cells of the brood comb, which is the nursery of the hive. A few are Drone eggs and are laid in large cells. She never lays any Queen eggs, for she does not want more Queens growing up. It is a law among the Bees that there can be only one grown ...
— Among the Farmyard People • Clara Dillingham Pierson
... I have is my own, if labour in getting, and care in augmenting, can make a right of property; and no drone shall feed on my honeycomb. Think on it well: what I have said is not without reflection, and what I resolve upon I ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... humor for it, Nicanor could work very well indeed, as he had shown. But more often than not he was sadly out of humor; and liked nothing so much as to slip away from the hum and drone of the wheels and the smell of bone and oil, and wander out of the quiet church precinct down to the busy life at the fords. Here was unending amusement; all day long he would watch the going and the coming, listen to the uproar of traffic, silent himself or mingling ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... Canada wants a clearing out, like what you are getting in Ireland, before a healthy regeneration can set in. The religion is faulty; the habits and traditions of the race are faulty; Jean Baptiste is the drone in our colonial hive. He won't gather honey: he will just live, indolently drawling through an existence diversified by feast and fast days; and all his social vices flourish in shelter of this seignorial system—this—this upas-tree which England ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... was I who had uttered words which were painful and astounding to one conscious of unimpugnable motives. In the days of toil to come, we were reminded, the Young Person, to wit, myself, would have no share. She would be but skeptic, critic, drone in the busy hive. Thus it was obvious that the Young Person could not with any trace of justice claim part or lot in the treasure. Were it not well, then, that the Young Person be required to make formal and written renunciation ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... of the shadows and the rising drone of night sounds and the whispering of the breeze which was all that was left of the wind, the man came riding cautiously up through a draw to the willow growth just below Sinkhole watering place. He tied his horse there ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... go there with you. Your House of Commons always fascinates me. I hear you speak, perhaps? No? What does it matter? I will hear the others drone. I go to ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... impression, at least, at the moment. He spun his hunter round and dropped sheer for a thousand feet, coming up in a fairly thick bank of white cloud. He there flattened out again and began climbing, not being sure of his altitude. No sooner had his engine begun to drone out the rhythm of its full power, and the good hunter-plane begun to rise majestically, than what should he see but the second enemy fighter right in front of him! A new drum was in place on his Lewis gun, and he let go. The Boche pilot threw up both hands and fell back, and down ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... a moment of silence. The drone of a bumble-bee near by seemed to make the silence swim drowsily in their ears; far off they heard the faint beat of a woodpecker. The suggestion of their kneeling figures in this magic mirror was vague, unreasoning, yet for ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... Mary V had announced that she would be looking for him. Johnny winced from the thought of Mary V, out on the porch, watching the sky toward Tucson for the black speck that would be his airplane; listening for the high, strident drone that would herald his coming. She would cry ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... revolving this business in her mind the whale birds flitting about in the darkness outside suddenly ceased their crying and through the silence came a vague mysterious sound that deepened into a humming like the drone of a gigantic top; the humming became a roar, the roar of rain. Rain falling in solid sheets, coming across the land like a moving Niagara, now taking the beach and now the sea. Never had she heard such rain as this, falling in the black and utter darkness. ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... had fully expected to pass by daylight through the Empire State, and she had thought with how much delight her eye would rest upon the grassy meadows, the fertile plains, the winding Mohawk, the drone-like boats on the canal, the beautiful Cayuga, and the silvery water so famed in song; but, in contrast to all this, she was shut up in a dingy car, whose one dim lamp sent forth a sickly ray and sicklier ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... Even the drone of thunder and the beat of rain urged him on. To him there was nothing absurd in the quest he was about to make. It was the least he could do, and the only honest thing he could do, he kept telling himself. And there was a chance that he would find her. All through ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... leisurely. In a word, everything is done with a bounce, and a thump, and an air, and a flourish, and sharp and eager motions, and perpetual volubility of tongue. His image is that of a blind beetle in the twilight, which, with incessant hum and drone and buzz, flies blundering into the face of every ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... caught the drone of bees and his sharp eye watched them climb slowly toward their storehouse in a towering tree. All nature was laughing in the madness ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... a mood to see Jarvis for two more days. Instead of trying to win her forgiveness for a wrong—he had not committed—he stuck the closer to his stateroom, where, with the solicitous attention of Rusty, he lived a drone-like and peaceful existence, poring over books. They were not fiction or philosophy—the Kentuckian's interest was in Baedeker and other books on Spain. With the same application which had carried him over the thin ice of college examinations, he had grasped a valuable understanding ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... musick of the bagpipe every day, at Armidale, Dunvegan, and Col. Dr. Johnson appeared fond of it, and used often to stand for some time with his ear close to the great drone. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... anticipatory hum of the insects. Getting into bed, I threw a propitiatory prayer in their general direction. A half hour later, I coughed pretentiously to attract my guru's attention. I thought I would go mad with the bites and especially the singing drone as the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... last into the cause of his brother-in-law and the distressed English. He persuaded the King of Denmark to enter into the same measures, who agreed to invade England with a fleet of a thousand ships. Drone, an Irish king, declared in their favor, and supplied the sons of Earl Godwin with vessels and men, with which they held the English ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... delivered from spiritual darkness and brought into spiritual light by means of song?—a benefit which will last through eternity as well as time. Even the man of wealth who lives on the interest of his possessions is not necessarily a drone in the human hive. He may, by wise and careful use of his wealth, greatly increase the world's riches. By the mere management of it he may fill up his days with useful and happy employment, and by devoting it and himself to God ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... was there, balancing herself dangerously with two cushions on the arm of a big rocker. Eveley called Kitty the one drone in her circle of friendship, for Kitty was born to golden spoons and lived a life of comfort and ease and freedom from responsibility in a great home with a doting father, and two attentive maids. Eileen Trevis was there, too, having arrived promptly on the ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... turned again and swam easily, as I thought, shoreward. The song went on, but it seemed to ring in my ears as the drone of our miller's pipes comes up from the river on a still summer evening. ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... gave his friends leave to carry his corpse out of town, and bury them without their precincts, where they pleased. But any of the town's people, who were observed to accompany the funeral were imprisoned. After they were gone out of town, his friends sent two men before them to Drone, four miles from Perth, to prepare a grave in that church-yard. The men went to Mr. Pitcairn, the minister there (one of the old resolutioners), and desired the keys of the church-yard that they might dig a grave for the corpse of Mr. Welwood, but he refused to give them. They went over the church-yard-dyke ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... it is, and the far woods are dim, and the rooks cry and call. Down in the valley the lamps, and the mist, and a star over all, There by the rick, where they thresh, is the drone at an end, Twilight it is, and I travel the road ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... she laved herself, singing softly the while to herself as is customary with many Polynesian native women when bathing, when suddenly, through the humming drone of the beating surf on the windward reef, she ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... not, dearest husband? You would not have your wife a drone in these days, when the world all round us is ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... bother about etchings and sonatas and bits of carved ivory, not to speak of the men who created those things, and who were of no practical use to the community in which they lived. And the workmen in the factories listened to the drone of their engines until they too had lost all taste for the melody of the flute or fiddle of their peasant ancestry. The arts became the step-children of the new industrial era. Art and Life became entirely separated. Whatever ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... in her level, crystal-clear tones; "you know nothing of a man. Your men are maromeros. They are fit only to roll cigarettes in the shade until the sun strikes and shrivels them up. They drone in your hammocks and you comb their hair and feed them with fresh fruit. My man is of no such blood. Let him drink of the wine. When he has taken sufficient of it to drown one of your flaccitos he will come home to me more of a man than one thousand of your ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... instant's pause. Their alert ears caught the sounds of a distant scuffle. Then a pistol shot jarred the peaceful drone ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... notes, and can be little less ancient than the event which it recorded;" and that there is with it a paper which shows that an attempt was made in the last century (17th) to give it a modern dress, but that too many liberties had been taken with the melody, and the drone bass, which had been set to it for the lute, is a mere jargon. He then presents what he says is a faithful copy of this venerable relic of ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... father's side was the gentle Evangeline seated, Spinning flax for the loom that stood in the corner behind her. Silent awhile were its treadles, at rest was its diligent shuttle, While the monotonous drone of the wheel, like the drone of a bagpipe, Followed the old man's song, and united the fragments together. As in a church, when the chant of the choir at intervals ceases, Footfalls are heard in the aisles, or words of the priest at the altar, So, in each pause of the song, ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... skin. From street and sidewalk, transparent hot waves swam up and danced themselves into nothing; while from the river bank, a half-mile away, came a sound hotter than even the locust's midsummer rasp: the drone of a planing-mill. A chance boy, lying prone in the grass of the Court-house yard, was annoyed by the relentless chant and lifted his head to mock it: "AWR-EER-AWR-EER! SHUT UP, CAN'T YOU?" The effort was exhausting: ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... fasten the end of it into his right fist, as if he had been screwing a bolt into a socket. Having satisfied himself that his grip was secure, he let go the hold with his left hand, and crossed his arms on his breast, with the weapon projecting over his left shoulder, like the drone of ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... little Stock of Gain from the finest Flowers about the Town, I mean the Ladies and the Beaus. I have a numerous Swarm of Children, to whom I give the best Education I am able: But, Sir, it is my Misfortune to be married to a Drone, who lives upon what I get, without bringing any thing into the common Stock. Now, Sir, as on the one hand I take care not to behave myself towards him like a Wasp, so likewise I would not have him look upon me as an Humble-Bee; for which Reason I do all I can to put him upon laying up Provisions ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... names? Yes, some folks call me the Bee Bird or Bee Martin. Once in awhile I change my diet and do snap up a bee! but it is always a drone, not a honey-bee. Some ill-natured people say I choose the drones because they can't sting, and not because they are tramp bees and will ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... all the lights went out, for the fire-flies fled in every direction; but in the darkness Twinkle thought she could still hear the drone of the big bass fiddle and the flute-like trill ...
— Twinkle and Chubbins - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland • L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
... black night, and Trumet sidewalks were uneven and hard to navigate. But she stumbled on, up the main road to the Corners, down the "Turn-off," past the chapel of the Come-Outers, from the open window of which sounded the drone of a high, nasal voice. Josiah Badger was "testifying," and Keziah caught a fragment of the ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... growing hot in the clear air. The mist had lifted from the city below, and all the streets and open places were alive with noisy buyers and sellers, whose loud talking and disputing came up in a continuous hum to the palace on the hill, like the drone of a swarm of bees. The ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... More sweet than Nature's, when the drone Of bees is sweetest, and more deep Than when the rivers overleap The shuddering pines, and ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... music here for me, Joy I've none in single horn. When the mingled trumpets sound,[a] This is sweetest from the drone! ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... Mekinese missiles accelerated at a terrific rate. They left their parent ships far behind. They were a third of the way to the drone-fleet and the Liberty before ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... to provide himself with an axe and a prayer-book, and while he kept one eye on the whirring, humming wheels he kept the other on the good book, which he read by the flickering light of a candle set on a table. So the hours at first passed quietly with nothing to disturb him but the monotonous drone and click of the machinery. But on the stroke of twelve, as he was still reading with the axe lying on the table within reach, the door opened and in came two grey cats mewing, an old one and a young one. They sat down opposite him, but it was easy to see that they did ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... of her party; and idly watched a white hen with yellow kid boots and a coral comb in her nicely groomed hair picking daintily about the green under the oak trees that shaded the street. She listened to the drone of the bees in the garden near by, the distant whetting of a scythe, the monotonous whang of a steam thresher not far away, the happy voices of children, and thought how empty a life in this village would be; almost ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... a pragmatical moralist played upon by a sententious drone, he thought it politic to detach them, and vanquish Clara while she was in the beaten mood, as she had ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bang. He set a lamp on a table at the head of his bed and read his political economy until dawn. It was, in fact, too hot for any nervous person to sleep. Now and then his thoughts wandered, the incessant drone of the night insects outside seemed to distract his attention from his book like some persistent clamor of nature recalling him to his leading-strings in which she had held him from the first. But resolutely he turned again to his book. At dawn he fell asleep, and woke an hour later to another ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... knife-grinders at work, is no joke; especially when their melodies are mingled with the discordant cries of herons, and bitterns, and cranes, and the ceaseless buzz and hum of insects, like the bagpipe's drone, and the dismal croaking of boat-bills and frogs,—one kind of which latter, by the way, doesn't croak at all, but whistles, ay, better than many a bird! The universal hubbub is tremendous! I tell you, reader, ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... taken the little devil up, with no purpose but somehow because it seemed natural, and when the child laughed he knew he had made a hit and kept on, singing now, not a cradle song but a man's song, something he had not himself thought of since he heard his old grandmother drone it between smokes, while she sat by the fire and dreamed of times past. It was something about Malbrook—"gone to the army"—"hope he never'll come back." And there was Tira now, within the circle of his fascination, bending a little toward him, her eyes darker than he had seen them for many a day, ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... scandalous pluralist, restless and greedy, continually seeking and obtaining additional preferment, and as often being forced to resign. He was not the man to prosecute such a work as was to be done at Burgh; "he lived even as a drone in a hive; as the drone eateth and draggeth forward to himself all that is brought near, even so did he."[8] It is likely that for eight years after the death of John de Sais nothing was done to advance the building. But ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... world to disturb the onward current of her thoughts. More than all, the first breath of liberty after long restraint had enlarged and widened her determination to be always free, in spite of the world, and society, and the drone of the busy-bodies' gossip. In her heart, the memory of Bosio had grown in dignity, till it was solemn and imposing out of all proportion with what the man himself had been, even as Veronica had known him. To know the truth of what his real ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... Hotel in Montgomery, the property of his grandfather and his uncles, he may have found no more advantageous a field for his "beautiful things" than in the Georgia school-room, but even in that "dreamy and drowsy and drone-y town" there was some life "late in the afternoon, when the girls come out one by one and shine and move, just as the stars do an hour later." But Lanier was as patient and self-contained in peace as he had been brave in war, and he accepted the drowsy life of Montgomery as he ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... all around and the sweet breath of the opening roses stole in with the summer breeze, while the drone of bees and the pure notes of a song sparrow lulled him ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... to his button again, and his lethargy was renewed. The outer world grew vaguer; voices seemed to drone at a distance; sluggish time passed heavily—but some of it ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... permission to sit up and see the moon rise, was perched upon the other end of the bench, Petunia in her arms. A distant drone, which had been audible for some time, was gradually becoming a steady humming roar. A few moments later and a belated hydro-aeroplane passed across the face of the moon, a dragon-fly silhouette ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... darkened face of the Peruvian. But it did not last. In a few minutes the two young Burghers were not the only ones whom the spell had subdued—the wizard was netted too. And then, as he stood, his hands still fluttering, they heard him drone a string of words, a dull chant, level like an incantation, inevitably apt to the hour ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... government on some primitive planet. Usually, they're caught pretty quickly. But sometimes they evade capture. And they can end up by exerting serious influence in cultural patterns. Some planets have been set back, and even destroyed as a result of drone activity. Although their motives are different, drones're just as bad and just as dangerous as ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... again we only see her when she's out for play or meals, And distresses the fastidious by her gestures and her squeals, But she is not always idle or a decorative drone, And if she wastes her wages, well, she wastes what is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various
... chunks of red melon. Pilgrims with great bundles on their backs stood staring vacantly at the walls or at the sea; monks in long grey cloaks, square hats, and long hair, passed in and out like bees about a hive, and from a distance came a musical drone, ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... fearsome. Wasps we knew well and disdained, storming them in their fastnesses. But these great Beasts, vestured in angry orange, three stings from which—so 't was averred—would kill a horse, these were of a different kidney, and their warning drone suggested prudence and retreat. At this time neither villagers nor hornets encroached on the stillness: lessons, apparently, pervaded all Nature. So, after dabbling awhile in the well—what boy has ever passed a bit of water without messing in it?—I scrambled through the hedge, ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... under the influence of her narcotics; but to the accompaniment of her abominable drone what a hell of suspense did poor Lucille endure! At length, and not until considerably past ten o'clock, a light gleamed faintly and for an instant in the appointed spot, and then disappeared. It returned, however, and now shone steadily. The decisive moment which was to commence ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... seen as a Raphael or a Rubens with some cheap lithograph." These modern copies are the result of recent efforts to revive the use of this fascinating instrument. A barytone of a kindred nature was the viola di bordone or drone viol, so called because there was a suggestion of the buzzing of drone-flies, or humble bees, in the tones of its sympathetic strings, which often numbered as many as twenty-four. These violas recall the Hardanger peasant fiddle of Norway, of unknown origin and antiquity, whose ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... long ago. Whether by natural gift or acquired habit they could suffer pandemonium to reign all over the house, and yet lie ranked in the kitchen like Egyptian mummies, only that the sound of their snoring rose and fell ceaselessly like the drone of a bagpipe. Here the Six-Footers invaded them—in their citadel, so to speak; counted the bunks and the sleepers; proposed to put me in bed to one of the lasses, proposed to have one of the lasses out to make room for me, fell over chairs, and made noise enough ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... kindness, and they often did a service in their turn. I shall never forget a poor fellow called Brian, who believed that he was a priest, and who passed part of the day in church, going through the ceremonies of mass. There was a nasal drone to be heard in the cathedral every afternoon, and this was Brian reciting prayers which were doubtless not less acceptable than those of other people. The cathedral officials had the good sense not to interfere with him, and not to draw frivolous distinctions between the simple and ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... the Humming birds are less in size than the great fly wasp, and more slender than the drone. Their beak is a fine needle and their tongue a slender thread. Their little black eyes are like two shining points, and the feathers of their wings so delicate that they seem transparent. Their short feet, which they use very little, are so tiny one can scarcely see them. They ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various
... himself; but his life is not of that inspiriting kind that can be won through fighting the good fight only—or being believed to have fought it. His voice is the echo of a drone, drone-begotten and drone-sustained. It is not a tone that a man must utter or die—nay, even though he die; and likely enough half the allusions and hard passages in AEschylus of which we can make neither head nor tail are in reality only puffs of some of the ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... enough for the boy. Straightway he had a vivid picture before his mind, and as he listened to the men at the dinner-table, their rough clipped words set him down in the midst of their battlefields, he heard the drone of bullets, he quivered expecting the shock of a charge. But of all the Crimean nights this had been fraught ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... stenographer, tiptoeing in, replaced another, who as silently departed; and from the adjoining room, the subdued, nervous, rapid click, click, click of the typewriting machine invaded, without disturbing, her consciousness. Towards three o'clock the low drone of the rotaries in the cellar made itself felt rather than heard; the early edition for the country was being run off. Time was flying—danced away by nimble feet in the West End, worked away by nimble ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... his end. & he abusing me to my face, dru upon him with intent to corb his insolent & dastardli sperrite.... Ister daye on Pickeren their Chorch Warden caim up to us with intent to make some of ourse drone as is sospeckted but the Lord sofered him so to misdemen himslfe as he is likli to li by the hielse this too month.... My homble request is that you will be charitable of me.... Let justies and merci be goyned.... You may plese to soggest youer will to this barrer you will ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... commonness would have had a certain vigor; but to be nearly refined without being quite refined is as harrowing as singing just a little off the key. To be far off the key is to be in another key, but to smite at a note and muff it is excruciation. Better far to drone middle C than to aim at high C and ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... instead of living in and for the world's good, we separate ourselves from our kind, and pass the years in fruitless meditation or selfish idleness? No. The active bad man is often more useful to the world than the naturally good or harmless man who is a mere drone. Only the brave soldier receives the laurels of his country's gratitude; the skulking coward is execrated ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... me that ours was never the love of a man and woman whose hearts were attuned to one another, and sang in perfect unison. We really drifted into an engagement more because of propinquity than anything else. I am a drone—the product of society at its worst—and you are one of the workers, Donald. I feel quite sure that you will always gain your truest happiness in your work. Although I know how you love children (and I don't), I cannot think of you in the role ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... suffered sorely even to this hour, from Nero down to Pio Nono, the days of thine oppression are over. Gone from thy enfranchised ways for ever is the clang of the praetorian cohorts and the more odious drone of meddling monks!" And yet, as Mackinnon observed, there still stood the dirty friars and the small French soldiers, and there still toiled the slow priests, wending their tedious way up to the ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... When the drone of the thresher breaks through the autumn sighing of trees and wind, or through that stillness of the first frost, I get restless and more restless, till, throwing down my pen, I have gone out to see. For there is nothing like the sight of threshing for making ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... laughing, and squatted down on the floor, concealed by the window-seat. The sound of the pipes increased till their rough drone seemed to be in the room, bidding a rustic defiance to its whiteness and its silence. Still squatting on the floor, Lucrezia ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... opened the gate. Behind the house, where the ground sloped toward the orchard, there were a number of cabins, old, but not deserted, for negro children were playing about the doors and from somewhere within came the low drone of a half-religious, half-cornshucking melody. An old dog got up from under a tree, but, repenting of the exertion, lay down again; a turkey loudly gobbled, a peacock croaked, and a tall, bulky, old man came out upon ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... symbol and subtle suggestion has the villa to do, but with such stolid, intellectual fare as corresponds to its material wants. The villa has not time to think, the villa is the working bee. The tavern is the drone. It has no boys to put to school, no neighbours to study, and is therefore a little more refined, or, should I say? depraved, in its taste. The villa in one form or other has always existed, and always will exist so long as our present social system holds together. It is the basis of life, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... you ought to mean is that you have a roof that is flat and has things on it that make it livable, where you can walk, disport yourself, or sleep; a house-top view of your neighbors' affairs; an airy pleasance with a full sweep of stars; a place to listen of nights to the drone of the city; a place of observation, and if you are so inclined, ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... Sky Queen soared toward the ocean. Soon they came in sight of Fearing Island rocket base, a few miles off the coast. Once a barren stretch of sand dunes and scrub-grass, the island was now the Swifts' top-secret rocket laboratory, guarded by drone planes and radar. It served as the supply base for Tom's space station and as the launching area for all space flights. Seacopters and ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... give to the Indian conjuror as an artist, either in sleight-of-hand, in juggling, or as an illusionist. His tricks are as "old as my unpaid bills" and from time immemorial have been performed with the same monotonous patter and the irritating drone of the "bean" or so called musical instrument. I may here say that this musical torture is used to disguise movements of the showman's hand in the same way as the European uses his magic wand, an instrument that does not appeal to me at all, ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... there was another, less hateful, but still more tiresome, because she favoured him, and was always thrusting him upon me, and sounding his praises in my ears—Mr. Boarham by name, Bore'em, as I prefer spelling it, for a terrible bore he was: I shudder still at the remembrance of his voice—drone, drone, drone, in my ear—while he sat beside me, prosing away by the half-hour together, and beguiling himself with the notion that he was improving my mind by useful information, or impressing his dogmas upon ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... for a "Start in Life Fund" were occupying a great deal of his attention and were crystallizing into concrete form. He hoped that he might soon cease to be a drone, and end by being of some real use in the world. But as Peter junior passed out of the shop, his promise to keep "hands off the Hands" seemed one of the things to regret, whether selfishly or otherwise. ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... advanced races of men, but among no other group of animals. I need only mention the social organisation and government of the monarchic bees and the republican ants, and their division into different conditions—queen, drone-nobles, workers, educators, soldiers, etc. One of the most remarkable phenomena in this very interesting province is the cattle-keeping of the ants, which rear plant-lice as milch-cows and regularly extract their honeyed juice. ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... grows apace with the hour, till honor and justice, truth and manliness, are lost together in the furious chaos of human elements. The tortured airs of heaven howl out curses in a horrid unison, this fair free soil of ours, dishonored and befouled, moans beneath our feet in a dismal drone of hopeless woe; there is no rock or cavern or ghostly den of our mighty land but hisses back the echo of some hideous curse, and hell itself is upon earth, split and ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... of his wife as, in some vague way, a tribute to his own high mightiness and consideration. Whatever is revolt against her immediate indolence and efficiency, his ideal is nearly always a situation in which she will figure as a magnificent drone, a sort of empress without portfolio, entirely discharged from every unpleasant ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... setting up minor interference in business or government on some primitive planet. Usually, they're caught pretty quickly. But sometimes they evade capture. And they can end up by exerting serious influence in cultural patterns. Some planets have been set back, and even destroyed as a result of drone activity. Although their motives are different, drones're just as bad and just as dangerous as ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... Great portions of the roof had been torn away by shell-fire, and there were gaping holes in the walls through which could be caught glimpses of sentries going backwards and forwards. Sometimes a grey battalion swung by; sometimes a German officer peered in curiously, with a sneer on his lips. The drone of aircraft came from above, through the holes where the rafters showed black against the sky. Ever the guns boomed ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... it grew hot. The train, deliberate and determined as a tortoise, moved through a shimmer of light. The drone of insect voices rose in a sleepy chorus and the men drowsed in the wagons. Even the buoyant life of the young girl seemed to feel the stupefying weight of the prairie's deep repose. She rode at a foot pace, her hat hanging by its strings to the pommel, her hair ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... and heaven, Roll back her outrage, and indignant shed The world's wide vengeance on her sevenfold head. Then dwindling back to littleness and shade Man soon forgets the gorgeous glare he made, Sinks to a savage serf or monkish drone, Roves in rude hordes or counts his beads alone, Wars with his arts, obliterates his lore, And burns the books ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... this business in her mind the whale birds flitting about in the darkness outside suddenly ceased their crying and through the silence came a vague mysterious sound that deepened into a humming like the drone of a gigantic top; the humming became a roar, the roar of rain. Rain falling in solid sheets, coming across the land like a moving Niagara, now taking the beach and now the sea. Never had she heard such rain as this, falling in the black and utter ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... beaver, The beaver is a very instinctive animal. There are several varieties, The Dam Builder, The Bank Beaver, The Bachelor Beaver and the Drone Beaver. The beaver ranges in color from white to black. I never saw a white one, and but one black one except when I looked in the glass. The Beaver weighs from twenty to thirty pounds in the United States, and from ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... stands poised; the holiday spirit is unabated. But as the harvest ripens beneath the long, hot days, the melody gradually ceases. The young are out of the nest and must be cared for, and the moulting season is at hand. After the cricket has commenced to drone his monotonous refrain beneath your window, you will not, till another season, hear the wood thrush in all his matchless eloquence. The bobolink has become careworn and fretful, and blurts out snatches of his song between his scolding and upbraiding, as you ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... species of the Humming birds are less in size than the great fly wasp, and more slender than the drone. Their beak is a fine needle and their tongue a slender thread. Their little black eyes are like two shining points, and the feathers of their wings so delicate that they seem transparent. Their short ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various
... Copyright is defined by Drone in his "Law of Copyright," as "the exclusive right of the owner to multiply and to dispose of copies of an intellectual production." It is also used as a synonym for literary property. Regarding literary property, ...
— International Copyright - Considered in some of its Relations to Ethics and Political Economy • George Haven Putnam
... called blue. Against this the silhouetted outlines of slag-heaps and pits and houses, now ruined, now whole. By the roadside little huts some three feet square built by their owners, who gathered around little blazing fires now that their day's work was done. The low drone of homing planes filled the air as one by one they swooped down to earth, or rose on some perilous mission, while bursting shrapnel added golden balls of fire to the firmament of heaven, now a deep, deep blue. To north, to east, to south, yellow-green flashes ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... had done dinner, I slept a little as my custom is, and the last sound that I heard, and the first upon awaking, was the drone of the bees. When I awakened I thought that I would walk down to Master Richard's house and see how all fared. So I took my staff and ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... me a pleasant night; you would drive me from this cosy spot! Was it not enough to have wrapped me in my winding-sheet and borne me to the grave? A greater power has lifted up the stone. In vain did your priests drone over the trench they dug for me. Of what use are salt and water, where burns the fire of youth? The earth cannot freeze up love. You made a promise; I have just ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... agas do'n Mhac, agas do'n Spiorad Naomh," went the drone of the rosary within. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... himself with an axe and a prayer-book, and while he kept one eye on the whirring, humming wheels he kept the other on the good book, which he read by the flickering light of a candle set on a table. So the hours at first passed quietly with nothing to disturb him but the monotonous drone and click of the machinery. But on the stroke of twelve, as he was still reading with the axe lying on the table within reach, the door opened and in came two grey cats mewing, an old one and a young one. They sat down opposite him, but it was easy to see that they did not like ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... man who wandered, brooding, His face a little whiter than the dusk. A drone of sultry wings flicker'd in ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... little less ancient than the event which it recorded;" and that there is with it a paper which shows that an attempt was made in the last century (17th) to give it a modern dress, but that too many liberties had been taken with the melody, and the drone bass, which had been set to it for the lute, is a mere jargon. He then presents what he says is a faithful copy of this venerable relic of our ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... are grown; Fun and frolic no more he knows; Robert of Lincoln's a hum-drum drone; Off he flies, and we sing as he goes, Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink, When you can pipe that merry old strain, Robert of Lincoln, come back again. ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... paste-board furniture, and bits of colored tissue paper for rugs, and pieces of silk and linen from the rag-bag for bed-clothes; how they had hummed and whistled to themselves as they worked (she could hear them now!); and how the aromatic woodsy smell of the unfinished old room and the drone of the rain on the roof had been a part of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... too far off, and there is no school. But the clergyman is not fit to be heard, he is such a drone in the pulpit; and it is a sweet employment to train one's own children, who thus avoid contamination by ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the door of his fancy against her with a bang. He set a lamp on a table at the head of his bed and read his political economy until dawn. It was, in fact, too hot for any nervous person to sleep. Now and then his thoughts wandered, the incessant drone of the night insects outside seemed to distract his attention from his book like some persistent clamor of nature recalling him to his leading-strings in which she had held him from the first. But resolutely he turned again to his book. At ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... French and German—for he found both those languages would be very useful to him in the City; while Agnes was busy over her drawing-board, tracing designs for Christmas and Easter cards. She declared she was not going to be the only drone in the hive, and bade fair to be successful later on, for two of her little cards had already been accepted by a great City publishing firm. When Mr. Murray dropped in of an evening he used to have a long look from one to the other of their cheerful, contented faces, and then he would ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... (An air on the drone-pipes is heard, and Montfleury enters, enormously stout, in an Arcadian shepherd's dress, a hat wreathed with roses drooping over one ear, blowing ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... it twenty-three? Oh, yes, twenty-three) women and children in the suburban village of Karzan. The pogrom, it seemed, had been accomplished by an energy weapon which ate great, gaping holes in the sides of buildings. A third witness took the stand, continuing the drone as the room grew hotter and muggier. Zeckler grew paler and paler, his eyes turning glassy as the testimony piled up. "But it's not true," he ...
— Letter of the Law • Alan Edward Nourse
... what wit, what profundity, what vastness of knowledge, what a grand gossip concerning all things, and more beside, did we anticipate, only to find the promise broken, and a big impostor with no more muscle than the black drone who fills the pipes and sentries the seraglio of the Sophi or the Sultan! The big, burly beggars! For a century nobody has read them, and therefore everybody has admitted them to be great. They are bulky paradoxes, and find a good reputation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... byre now at home beyond the sea, and it is not strange faces he will be seein', but the lads and lassies of the Glen, and it is John McNeash who holds the drone under his arm and the chanter in his hands, and the salty tang of the sea comes up to him and the peat-smoke is in his nostrils, and the pipes skirl higher and higher as Tonald McKenzie dances the dance of ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... -o; (day-), rev'o, -i. dredge : skrapegi. dress : robo; vesti, sin vesti. drill : bori; ekzerco, manovro. drink : trinki, (to excess) drinki. drive : veturi; peli. "—away", forpeli. droll : ridinda, sxerca. drone : abelviro; zumi. drop : gut'o, -i. drown : dron'i, -igi. drug : drogo. drum : tamburo. drunken : ebria. dry : seka. "—land", firmajxo. duck : anasino, anaso. duration : dauxro. duty : devo, (tax) imposto. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... pursuing me still! Ah, woe upon me, woe ineffable! He steals upon my track, a hound of hell— Where'er I stray, along the sands and brine, Weary and foodless, come his creeping eyne! And ah, the ghostly sound— The wax-stopped reed-flute's weird and drowsy drone! Alack my wandering woes, that round and round Lead me in many mazes, lost, foredone! O child of Cronos! for what deed of wrong Am I enthralled by thee in penance long? Why by the stinging bruise, the thing of fear, Dost thou torment me, heart and brain? Nay, give me rather ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... to rehearse My Ewie's praise in proper verse, I 'd sound it forth as loud and fierce As ever piper's drone could blaw; The Ewie wi' the crookit horn, Wha had kent her might hae sworn Sic a Ewe was never born, Hereabout nor far awa'; Sic a Ewe was never ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Augustine Birrell who said, "George Henry Lewes was the busy drone to a queen bee." It probably is well that Mr. Spencer and Miss Evans did not marry—they were too much alike—they might have gotten into competition with ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... I hold divine: A trusting chi id's hand laid in mine, Rich brown earth and wind-tossed trees, The taste of grapes and the drone of bees, A rhythmic gallop, long June days, A rose-hedged lane and lovers' lays, The welcome smile on neighbors' faces, Cool, wide hills and open places, Breeze-blown fields of silver rye, The wild, sweet note of the plover's cry, Fresh spring showers and scent of box, The soft, ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... the carousers. There I sat down upon the well-remembered boulder, lost in recollections of all that had passed on those sands, while over the sea the night spread like the widening, darkening wings of an enormous spectral bird, whose brooding voice was the drone of the waves as they came nearer and nearer. Then I began to think of what lay before me, of the strangeness and ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Indies. A romantic account is given of this in an extract cited by Dr. Watson in his communication to the Royal Society.[O] "The vegetable fly is found in the island Dominica, and (excepting that it has no wings) resembles the drone, both in size and colour, more than any other English insect. In the month of May it buries itself in the earth and begins to vegetate. By the latter end of July, the tree is arrived at its full growth, and resembles a coral branch, and is about three inches high, and bears several little ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... Registers" are all that the veracious chronicler, who will not let his imagination run riot, can find to put before us. But happily, in the wildest days of the Middle Ages, there were found some peace-loving souls who preferred to drone away their lives in quiet meditation behind the walls of the great monasteries, undisturbed by the clash of swords. Some outlet had to be found for their innate energies and their intense religious enthusiasm; missionary zeal had ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... the station platform, in the dark, glowering at the lights of the town, then started abruptly and made his way into the gambling room of the Plaza, where he somberly watched the players. The rattle of chips, the whir of the wheel, the monotonous drone of the faro dealer, the hum of voices, some eager, some tense, others exultant or grumbling, the incessant jostling, irritated him. He went out the front door, stepped down into the street, and walked eastward. Passing an ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... but his life is not of that inspiriting kind that can be won through fighting the good fight only—or being believed to have fought it. His voice is the echo of a drone, drone-begotten and drone-sustained. It is not a tone that a man must utter or die—nay, even though he die; and likely enough half the allusions and hard passages in AEschylus of which we can make neither head nor tail are in reality only puffs of some ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... success was achieved, I considered myself reasonably entitled to escape from the dreary debates. One joyful night, therefore, I noted down the music of the parliamentary bagpipes for the last time, and I have never heard it since; though I still recognize the old drone in the newspapers, without any substantial variation (except, perhaps, that there is more of it), all ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... with dinnymite, th' Czar's uncle had been shot, an' wan iv his cousins was expirin' fr'm a dose iv proosic acid. All was comparitive peace. In th' warrum summer's afthernoon th' Czar felt almost dhrousy as he set in his rile palace an' listened to th' low, monotonous-drone iv bombs bein' hurled at th' Probojensky guards, an' picked th' broken glass out iv th' dhrink that'd just been brought to him be an aged servitor who was prisidint iv th' Saint Pethersburg lodge iv Pathriotic Assassins. Th' monarch's mind turned to th' ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... bestow upon him. With the advent of the dry season, peace settled over the sequestered town, while its artless folk drowsed away the long, hot days and danced at night in the silvery moonlight to the twang of the guitar and the drone of the amorous canzonet. Jose was deeply grateful for these days of unbroken quiet, and for the opportunity they afforded him to probe the child's thought and develop his own. Day after day he taught her. Night after night he visited ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... 'shake up that drone and drunkard, Carlton; tell him that his master directs that the travelling carriage shall be at ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... snatch up at a moment's notice; and some of them were not unacquainted with fighting. Dire silence prevailed among the men, but the women shouted as they ran, and the curious army moved forward to the drone and squall of drum and pipe. The enemy was sighted on the level land of Cabbylatch, and here, while the intending combatants glared at each other, a well-known local magnate galloped his horse between them and ordered them in the name of the king to return to their homes. But for the farmers ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... tongue,— He liked the thrush that fed her young,— He liked the drone of flies among His netted peaches; He liked to watch the sunlight fall Athwart his ivied orchard wall; Or pause to catch the cuckoo's call ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... "Very well, thanks, and how is Mrs....?" "When can I see you to-morrow?" "I'll take your offer for those bonds." ... And I could see the interiors of innumerable offices and drawing-rooms.... But of course I could hear and see nothing really except the intent drone and quick gesturing of those completely absorbed young creatures in the dim radiance, on stools ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... stands Within her woven cell: the humming prey, Regardless of their fate, rush on the toils Inextricable, nor will aught avail Their arts, or arms, or shapes of lovely hue; The wasp insidious, and the buzzing drone, And butterfly, proud of expanded wings Distinct with gold, entangled in her snares, Useless resistance make; with eager strides, She towering flies to her expected spoils; Then, with envenomed jaws, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... anticipated. She had fully expected to pass by daylight through the Empire State, and she had thought with how much delight her eye would rest upon the grassy meadows, the fertile plains, the winding Mohawk, the drone-like boats on the canal, the beautiful Cayuga, and the silvery water so famed in song; but, in contrast to all this, she was shut up in a dingy car, whose one dim lamp sent forth a sickly ray and sicklier ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... answer to the question. "It's a place where there's misery, starvation, and crime of all sorts,—and there I am in the very midst of it—just where I want to be. Ye see, I was meant to be a meenister—one of those douce, cannie, comfortable bodies that drone in the pulpit about predestination and original sin, and so forth a—sort, of palaver that does no good to ony resonable creature—an' if I had followed out this profession, I make nae doot that, with my aunt's seventy thousand, I should be a vera comfortable, ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... laundress now here, what a helping hand we might have of them! Where are now the two Chair-women also, they were commonly every day about the house, and now we stand in such terrible need of them, they are not to be found? Herewith must the poor Drone, very unexpectedly, get out of bed, almost stark naked, having hardly time to put on his shoes and stockins; for the labour comes so pressing upon her, that it is nothing but, hast, hast, hast, fetch the Midwife with all possible speed, and alas, there is so many several occasions ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... hear the drone and wheeze of that hymn now. I hated them with the bitter uncharitable condemnation of boyhood, and a twinge of that hate comes back to me. As I write the words, the sounds and then the scene return, these obscure, undignified people, a fat woman with asthma, an old Welsh milk-seller with a tumour ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... one! thou who hast bowed thy neck to imperial pride and priestly craft, thou who has suffered sorely even to this hour, from Nero down to Pio Nono, the days of thine oppression are over. Gone from thy enfranchised ways for ever is the clang of the praetorian cohorts and the more odious drone of meddling monks!" And yet, as Mackinnon observed, there still stood the dirty friars and the small French soldiers, and there still toiled the slow priests, wending their tedious way up to the church of the Ara Coeli. But that was the mundane ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... amused me but never so much as when tolerating rural joys. He was the exact opposite of my Cavanagh. Everything pastoral wearied him or irritated him. The "yelping" of the robins, the "drone" of the katydids, the "eternal twitter" of the sparrows infuriated him. The "accursed roosters" unseasonably wakened him in the morning, the "silly cackle" of the chickens prevented him from writing. Flowers bored him and the weather was always too cold or too hot, too damp or too dusty. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Malcolm's lips, Trembl'd and started, and let down her brow, Hiding its sudden rose on Malcolm's arm. "Max Gordon? Yes. Was he a friend of yours?" "No friend of mine, but of the lassie's here— "How comes he on? I wager he's a drone, "And never will put honey in the hive." "No drone," said Alfred, laughing; "when I left "He and his axe were quarr'ling with the woods "And making forests reel—love steels a lover's arm." O, blush that stole from Katie's swelling heart, And ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... the diminishing drug. From across the room there came a very queer sound. A scuttling, scratching, and the drone of wings. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... changed the subject and pointed to the man in the bows. He sat upright with his back to them at the wheel forward. He had taken off his hat and was singing very gently to himself, but hardly loud enough to be heard against the drone of the engines. His song was from an early opera ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... pulled the cord round my arms pretty tightly; that numbed me all over, and the exposure to the air did the rest. I fell into a dreamy condition. I only know that never for a moment were we still. There was always the drone of the wheels in my ears, and whenever I made a struggle and opened my eyes, all I could see was the blacker streak in the blackness caused by the hedges flying past. Heaven only knows how far and where we went. It seemed an eternity until it ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... pluralist, restless and greedy, continually seeking and obtaining additional preferment, and as often being forced to resign. He was not the man to prosecute such a work as was to be done at Burgh; "he lived even as a drone in a hive; as the drone eateth and draggeth forward to himself all that is brought near, even so did he."[8] It is likely that for eight years after the death of John de Sais nothing was done to advance the building. But the Prior ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... echoes—there were none in reality—returning from roof and tree, and I had the feeling of the air being made up of voices, and of whirling in this magic ether. The woman I observed would seem about to stop, her voice falling away almost to no sound, and the prolonged drone of the chorus dying out, when, as if she had come to life again, she sang out at the top of her lungs, and the ranks again took up their tones. I could almost trace the imposition of the religious strain ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... friendly with this amiable lady. If he had been afraid that his voice, in these delicate southern ears, must sound like the first guttral drone of Donald's Pipes at Castle Dare, he had speedily lost that fear. The manly, sun-browned face and clear-glancing eyes were full of animation; he was oppressed no longer by the solemnity of the servants; so long as he talked to her he was quite confident; he had made friends with this ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... he said. "It is making a man of Walter. He has been a drone, hitherto. Now he has become a worker, and, though I may not like him better, for he was always near to my heart, ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... nook on my right stands the little brown mill, with its huge wheel, and wide blue pond, and foamy waterfall. On that day I heard its drone, and saw the geese bathing, and throwing up the bright sparkling drops with their wings, until ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... soldiery silently up the narrow secret stair, pushed back, with much circumspection and caution, the sliding panel, listened for a moment to the low murmur of their lordships' voices, waited until each of his men had gone stealthily behind the tapestry, listened again and still heard the drone of speech, he returned as he came, and accompanied by a guard of two score, escorted the Empress to the broad public stairway that led up one flight to the door of the Wahlzimmer. The two sentinels at the foot of the stairs crossed their pikes to ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... room, the decision on the evidence of the medical expert. Then the secretary arose and began to read the indictment, loud and with distinctness, but so rapidly that his incorrect sounding of the letters l and r turned his reading into one continuous, weary drone. The judges leaned now on one side, now on the other side of their arm-chairs, then on the table, and again on the backs of the chairs, or closed their eyes, or opened them and whispered to each other. One of the gendarmes ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... business, the dinner over, and they gone up to the drawing-room. Think how agreeable and graceful it would be for Mrs. Daniel O'Connell to repair to the sofa, among a few respectable friends, and, taking up her bagpipes, set her elbow a-going, until the drone gives two or three broken groans, and the chanter a squeak or two, like a child in the cholic, or a cat that you had trampled on by accident. Then comes the real ould Irish music, that warms the heart. Dan looks upon her graceful position, ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... the time he would if he had proceeded more leisurely. In a word, everything is done with a bounce, and a thump, and an air, and a flourish, and sharp and eager motions, and perpetual volubility of tongue. His image is that of a blind beetle in the twilight, which, with incessant hum and drone and buzz, flies blundering into the face of every one ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... fresh verses, with which his visit to Percerin had inspired him; Loret, his article on the marvelous fetes he predicted; and Aramis, laden with booty like the king of the bees, that great black drone, decked with purple and gold, re-entered his apartment, silent and busy. But before departing, "Remember, gentlemen," said he, "we ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... which was to be their future home. The pipers stood at the threshold of Jack Dwyer, and his daughter departed from under the "roof-tree" to the tune of "Joy be with you"; and then the lilters, heading the body-guard of the bride, plied drone and chanter right merrily until she had entered her new home, thanked her old friends (who did all the established civilities, and cracked all the usual jokes attendant on the occasion); and Andy bolted the door of the snug cottage of which he had so suddenly become master, and placed ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... chastened atmosphere was perfect. Rocky Springs, so far away, was powerless to affect it. Even the song of the tumbling creek, which coursed through the heart of the valley, was powerless to awaken discordant echoes. Its music was low and soft. It was like the drone of the stirring insects, part of that which went to make up ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... thoroughfare to and from the flower-covered plains below us. Particularly at morning and night their hum, echoing through the ravine and mingling with the murmur of the river, sounded like the drone of ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... spring you rose up, all of a sudden, and started in to cure me of being a drone. The medicine you used was strong; it did the business pretty thoroughly. You've no kick coming at the result. I'm ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... mournful drone, A part from aught to hear, to see, I dreamt not that from shires unknown In gloom, alone, By Halworthy, A man was ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... 1 The drone of the cockchafer, as he wheels by you in drowsy hum, sounds his corno di bassetto on F below the line.— Gardiner's Music ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... bores afflict this world, and some Are bores of magnitude that-come and—no, They're always coming, but they never go— Like funeral pageants, as they drone and hum Their lurid nonsense like a muffled drum, Or bagpipe's dread unnecessary flow. But one superb tormentor I can show— Prince Fiddlefaddle, Duc de Feefawfum. He the johndonkey is who, when I pen Amorous verses in an idle mood To nobody, or of her, reads them through ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... the United States and were at the temporary area command post not far from Boulder Lake. Rocket missiles were aimed and ready to blast the lake and the mountains around it should the need arise. A drone plane had been flown to the lake with a television camera transmitting back everything its lens saw. It arrived at the lake and its camera relayed back exactly nothing that had not been photographed and recorded before. But suddenly there was a crash of static and the drone went out of control and ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Landless, gazing at her, even in the act of raising his gun to his shoulder; "as beautiful as you were the day I first saw you. I hear the drone of the bees in the vines at Verney Manor. I smell the roses. I look up and see the Rose of the World. My eyes were dazzled then, are dazzled now, my Rose ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... to-day, and an uncommonly good one it seemed to me, and I was looking contentedly about my little family circle, wondering what more life could hold for a big healthy hulk of a woman like me, when the drone and purr of an approaching motor-car broke through the sound of our talk. Dinky-Dunk, in fact, was laying down the law about the farmer of the West, maintaining that he was a broader-spirited and bigger-minded man than his brother of the East, and ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... not be Jealous now, D'ye think I'll damn my self to break my Vow? I'd have you know I scorn the thing you fear, Of such foul Deeds my Conscience now is clear. But this I tell you for your further ease, Where I have been, I'll go when e'er I please. Do you think I'll be kept in like a Drone, While others reap the Pleasures of the Town. No Faith, I'll never yield to such hard Fate. To be confin'd; is what I always hate. The Honest Husband hearing what she said. He stood amaz'd, but yet no Answer made. He plainly saw his Ruin coming on, His own Disgrace, and all his ...
— The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses from Men • Various
... and fifty-five. Georgius Secundus was then alive—— Snuffy old drone from the German hive. That was the year when Lisbon-town Saw the earth open and gulp her down, And Braddock's army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. It was on the terrible Earthquake day That the ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... "A Drone and a Dreamer" is a rich fulfillment of this prophecy. Brimming over with genial humor and wholesome fun, the book is an exquisite love story and charming idyl of life among the mountains and ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... her soul—but souls are not vendible, and besides she did not know she possessed one—for the familiar redolences of naphtha and horse-dung and trodden turf. These were far away: they had quite forsaken her, or at best floated idly across her dreams. What held her to fortitude had been the drone and intermittent hoot of a steam-organ many streets away. It belonged to a roundabout, and regularly tuned up towards evening; so distant that Tilda could not distinguish one tune from another; only the thud of its bass mingled with the buzz of a fly on the window and with the ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... does a man of us cry "Shame!" Though every man would own If there is one high hope for which He labours on at fever-pitch It is not honour, wealth or fame— He wants to be a drone. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... sleepy in the least. A pleasant smell of ploughed ground comes strong upon us. The tinkle of ghostly cow-bells falls drowsily upon the ear. Airy figures of phenomenal esculents float dreamily before our half-shut eyes, and vanish ere perfect vision can catch them. About and above are the drone of bees, and the muffled thunder of milk streams shooting into the foaming pail. The gabble of distant geese is faintly marked off by the bark of a distant dog. The city with its noises sinks away from our feet as from one in a balloon, and our senses ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... through my waiting mail. There was nothing, absolutely nothing. I looked through the pile twice. A family reunion and they had not notified me! I had become as detached as all that! I glanced at Esther again. She was scratching away like mad. I heard the drone of a hurdy-gurdy outside. I would not stay here. The thought of a holiday in Irving Place became suddenly unendurable. I must escape it somehow. There was a train north an hour later. ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... slowly! One wave broke—the deacon had time to count eight steps; then another broke, and six steps; later a third. As before, nothing could be seen, and in the darkness one could hear the languid, drowsy drone of the sea. One could hear the infinitely faraway, inconceivable time when ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... now to return, since his seminary bride had fallen sick on the voyage. He perceived the teeming harbor clogged with junks and house-boats, the muddy river, an artery out of the heart of darkness, the fantastic, colored shore-lines, the vast, dull drone of heathendom stirring in his ears, the temple gongs calling blindly to the blind, the alluring and incomprehensible accents of the boatmen's tongue which he was to have made his own and lightened with the fierce sweet name of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... left Los Angeles weeks ago," the boy explained, "and at that time Mrs. Montrose and her nieces were busy as bees and much too occupied to pay attention to a drone like me. There was no hint then of their coming East, but of course many things may have ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... the whipping tent and threw himself upon it with the sleeping-bags. Having cut loose the dogs, Willard crawled within his sack and they drew the flapping canvas over them. The air was twilight and heavy with efflorescent granules that hurtled past in a drone. ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... vacancies in the episcopal bench. The British mother remembers a bishop whom she met at Lucerne, the Indian officer gets back by the Ghauts to the Schreckhorn, the graduate finds his way again through 'Manfred' to the precipices. In an instant the drone recommences, the cataract pours down again, and there is nothing for it but to wander out on the terrace of six feet by four, and wonder what the view would be if ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... no! Grooby and Havershon may be trusted to drone the evening out, I should hope, with no trouble to anybody but themselves. The Government are just keeping a house, that's all. Have you been grinding at ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the bag-pipe is the drone ground bass which sounds without intermission. Each drone is fitted with a beating-reed resembling the primitive "squeaker" known to all country lads; it is prepared by making a cut partly across a piece of cane or reed, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... tell me, if she desired me to know. I promised him long ago that I would register in his law office at the same time that Horace went to Vandecar's. Confound it, Ann!—I beg your pardon, but I feel as if I had been created for something more than to drone over petty ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... the quiet night. A light shone dimly from her father's window. At intervals a deep, contented sighing came from the cows in the barnyard. She took the path past the house and down to the corral, where she paused, her ear arrested by the steady drone of milking. A lantern sitting on the black earth, cast a little circle of light, and threw a docile cow in dreadful silhouette against the barn. And by that dim light Beulah discerned the bent form ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... treasonable acts have been concocted, and daring robberies committed in the troublous times not long past. To-day it is peaceable enough; so quiet in the summer afternoons, here in the very heart of the busy city, that the drone of the busy humming-birds among the flowers comes soothingly upon the ear of the wakeful dreamer. Quiet now, but awaiting the next upheaval, for such, we are sorry to say, is pretty sure to come, sooner or later; the Roman ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... which came to men like Tacitus from disbelief In the moral government of a degenerate world. Though he strives, like Tacitus, to take up his parable nec amore et sine odio, the disgust is ill concealed. There are passages where we almost hear the drone of a dowager in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was said of Tocqueville that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat. Sir Henry Maine in politics is a bureaucrat who cannot bear to think that democracy will win. He is dangerously near ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... crawled under the tent, and were soon enjoying that comfortable gift of sleep, which comes everywhere and to all men, quenching anxieties and speeding time. And no sooner were all settled, no sooner had the drone of many snorers begun to mingle with and overcome the surf, than Tommy stole from his post with the case of sherry, and dropped it in a quiet cove in a fathom of water. But the stormy inconstancy of Mac's behaviour had no connection with a gill or two of wine; his passions, angry and otherwise, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... horrible, as he recalled one of his pet abominations, a dirty, kilted and plaided Scotchman, who made night hideous about the Bloomsbury squares with his chanter and drone. ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... sweet delight, And with the high-risen moon came pensive thought, And men in love's despite must grow distraught And loiter in the dance, and maidens drop Their gathered raiment, and the fifer stop His dancing notes the pensive drone that chid, And as they wander to their dwellings, hid By the black shadowed trees, faint melody, Mournful and sweet, their soft good-night must be. Far better spoil the gathering vat bore in Unto the pressing shed, than midst the din Of falling houses in ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... could do to supply the girl's wants was done. Whether it was a continuous supply of peat for the fire in these chilly April days; or a newspaper from the town; or a bundle of daffodils from the wood below—some signs of a fatherly mind he was always showing towards this little drone in the hive. And Laura delighted in him—racked her brains to keep him talking ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ordered beer for the three of them, and they leant against the bar and whispered in sullen accents. Something had evidently miscarried with the Ring. Mrs. Dawes continued to whine above the general drone of the ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... masterly character study of the "sea-green incorruptible," too humane to swat a fly, yet capable of sending half of France to the guillotine in order that the half that was left might believe unanimously in the rights of man; all this the girl had let go by unheard, in favor, apparently, of the drone of a street piano, which came in through the open window on the prematurely warm March wind. Of all his philosophizing, there was not a pen-track to mar the virginity of the page she had opened her note-book ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... see that if such a decree is gone forth, you are supporting an idle man in vain?[1]—What end is preaching to answer? Let him lecture with ever such state and assurance, if the time, the place, the manner be all fixed: I say he is an ignorant, lazy drone, who is picking his poor people's pockets; but, perhaps, it was decreed that it ...
— A Solemn Caution Against the Ten Horns of Calvinism • Thomas Taylor
... sick on the voyage. He perceived the teeming harbor clogged with junks and house-boats, the muddy river, an artery out of the heart of darkness, the fantastic, colored shore-lines, the vast, dull drone of heathendom stirring in his ears, the temple gongs calling blindly to the blind, the alluring and incomprehensible accents of the boatmen's tongue which he was to have made his own and lightened with the fierce sweet name of the Cross—and now ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Genesis, and that it was Spring Street which was created in the beginning, and the heavens and earth at some subsequent period. There are houses in Spring Street, and there is a confectioner's shop; but it is not often that a sound comes across its rugged pavements, save perchance (in summer) the drone of an ancient hand-organ, such as might have been devised by Adam to console his Eve when Paradise was lost. Yet of late the desecrating hammer and the ear-piercing saw have entered that haunt of ancient peace. May it be long ere any such ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... in his time the bagpipe was quite a fashionable instrument. Chaucer and Spenser both allude to it, and the former says, in Henry IV., that Falstaff was 'as melancholy as a lover's lute, or drone of a bagpipe.' ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... houses in the Valley of the Mills; and in some of them lights were burning; and the drone of the mill-stones, where the women were still grinding, came out into the night like the humming of drowsy bees. As the women heard the pattering and bleating of the flock, they wondered who was passing so late. One ...
— The Sad Shepherd • Henry Van Dyke
... ears, and wonder who had got into the loft: they kept their places to enjoy the treat. When the organist saw this, he pushed the interloper off the stool, with "You'll never play 'em out this side Christmas." He then began his own drone, and the congregation began to move quietly away. "There," said he, "that's the way ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... sunbeams at its core. Well-pleased the wanderer landed on this shore, Beholding all its pleasantness, how sweet And soft, to the tired soul, to the tired feet. And so he sat him down beneath the boughs, And there a low wind seemed to drone and drowse Among the leaves as it were gone astray And like to faint forwearied by the way; Till the persistence of the sound begat An heaviness within him as he sat: So when Sleep chanced to come that way, he found A captive not unwilling ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... real difficulty under changing conditions of life, in natural selection accumulating to any extent slight modifications of instinct which are in any way useful"! How could the working bee conserve the gains accumulated by experience or habit? The drone is the father and the queen is the mother of the sterile female working bee. Neither parent knows how to build a cell. How could they transmit their knowledge or their habits to the working bee? Every new swarm of bees ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... an old place with low rooms and all cosey. Octavia was in there—the dining-room—helping to lay the cloth, as she had been rather clumsy, too, and been sent away, and her young man was as nice as mine; and we four had a superb time, as happy as children, but Tom was nothing but a drone, for he sat with Kitty in a window seat behind some curtains, and did not ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... always friendly, and gave them nuts out of their own hoards; but the bees were selfish and rude, justifying themselves on the ground that Tangle and Mossy were not subjects of their queen, and charity must begin at home, though indeed they had not one drone in their poorhouse at the time. Even the blinking moles would fetch them an earth-nut or a truffle now and then, talking as if their mouths, as well as their eyes and ears, were full of cotton wool, or their own velvety fur. By the time ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... river on a golden afternoon listening to its whispered melody, while the air about one is fragrant with summer, and heavy with the drone of unseen wings!—What ordinary mortal could wish for more? And yet, though conscious of this fair world about me, I was still uncontent, for my world was incomplete—nay, lacked its most essential charm, and I sat with my ears on the stretch, waiting ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... dinner, I slept a little as my custom is, and the last sound that I heard, and the first upon awaking, was the drone of the bees. When I awakened I thought that I would walk down to Master Richard's house and see how all fared. So I took my ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... I won't let it spoil my life," she resolved while she bit back a sob. "Whatever happens, I am not going to let my life be ruined." She had repeated this so often that it had begun to drone in her mind like a line out of a hymn-book; and she was still repeating it when she swept by Stephen without so much as a word or a look. A dangerous mood was upon her. Nothing mattered, she felt, if she could only prove to him that she also had been trifling; that his ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... the regiment, and lay panting, coughing, kicking out the embers, and hugging the ground closely, because now the storm that had swept the tree tops was shaving the weeds and grass around them; and the drone of bullets streaming over the ditch rose to ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... the whole scene of action year by year. It is an absolute impossibility to educate the child for any fixed station in life. So far as education is conducted unconsciously or consciously on this basis, it results in fitting the future citizen for no station in life, but makes him a drone, a hanger-on, or an actual retarding influence in the onward movement. Instead of caring for himself and for others, he becomes one who has himself to be cared for. Here, too, the ethical responsibility of the school on ...
— Moral Principles in Education • John Dewey
... nothing have to say Contrive to spend the longest time in doing it; They turn and vary it in every way, Hashing it, stewing it, mincing it, ragouting it; Sometimes they keep it purposely at bay, Then let it slip to be again pursuing it; They drone it, groan it, whisper it and shout it, Refute it, flout it, swear to 't, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... made up a lair for me with abundant greatcoats in the corner of the room, and my eyes gradually closed in sleep, catching, till they were finally sealed up, every now and then, twinklings of bare legs and well-turned ankles, mingled with the clatter of heavy brogues, and the drone of a bagpipe that had now superseded the squeak of the fife, and the rattle of ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... judge shut his eyes, with an air of a man who is going a long journey in a post-chaise. Mr. Baron Garrow dipped his pen into an invisible ink-pot, and scratched it on his desk. A long story began to drone from under the wig, an interminable farrago of dull nonsense, in a hypochondriacal voice; a long tale about piracy in general; piracy in the times of the Greeks, piracy in the times of William the Conqueror... ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... up, and all the school glanced with her. The drone of the reader hushed. The door opened softly, and upon the threshold stood Zora. Her small feet and slender ankles were black and bare; her dark, round, and broad-browed head and strangely beautiful face were poised almost defiantly, ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... also place among double-reed instruments the various bagpipes, cornemuses, and musettes, which are shawm or oboe instruments with reservoirs of air, and furnished with drones inclosing single reeds. I shall have more to say about the drone in the third lecture. In restricting our attention to the Highland bagpipe, with which we are more or less familiar, it is surprising to find the peculiar scale of the chaunter, or finger pipe, in an old Arabic scale, still prevailing in Syria and Egypt. Dr. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... troth," said the fool, thinking. "Since Eve fell into sin, women's counsel is often the best. You, Nunkey, shall be turned into a butterfly, and not into a drone, and grace the flowers ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... pretty garments, with which she had been bedecked, drenched in her own blood. A small clasp knife lay by her side, and there was a ghastly gash in her throat. The women lifted her up, and strove to staunch the bleeding, and as they fought to stay the life that was ebbing from her, the drone of the priests, and the beat of the drums, came to their ears from the men who were making merry without. Then suddenly the news of what had occurred spread among the guests, and the music died away, and was replaced by a babble of excited ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... is not any more complimentary to Catholic Galway than "The Drone" of Mr. Mayne is complimentary to Protestant Down, but it is seldom that comedy is complimentary to human nature, and "The Building Fund" is comedy. That is, it is comedy as Ibsen sees drama, or character ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Anybody, was in town. The rumble of carriages passing to and fro was incessant,—the swift whirr and warning hoot of coming and going motor vehicles, the hoarse cries of the newsboys, and the general insect-like drone and murmur of feverish human activity were as loud as at any busy time of the morning or the afternoon. There had been a Court at Buckingham Palace,—and a "special" performance at the Opera,—and on account of these two functions, entertainments were going on at almost every fashionable house ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... fire on this cheerless hearth the fortunes of the state were discussed and directed, benefices disposed of, court appointments debated, and reputations made and unmade in tones that suggested the low drone of a group of canons intoning the psalter in an empty cathedral. The Marchioness, who appeared as eager as the others to win Odo to her party, received him with every mark of consideration and pressed him to accompany ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... symmetry of the sapling,—the squalid shanty by the railroad, with its base of dirt, its windows stuffed with old hats, and the red shirts dependent from its eaves, than the neatest brick cottage. They strike a richer accord, while the others drone on a single note. Moonlight is always picturesque, because it substitutes mass and breadth for the obtrusiveness of petty particulars. It is not the pettiness, but the particularity, that makes them unpicturesque. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... even hideous countenance; she offered no words, she made no signs, of sympathy; and, as if to prove her hearty disregard, or profound contempt for the prisoner's manifest distress, she by and by, to while the time, began to drone out a succession of grunting sounds, such as make up a red-man's melody, and such indeed as any village urchin can drum with his heels out of an empty hogshead. The song, thus barbarously chanted, at first startled and affrighted the captive; but its ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... get anything to do, you mean, you lazy Cat! You are a good-for-nothing drone. Do you know what we do to our drones? We kill them; and that is all they are fit for. Good ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... where a good shower of rain has fallen, the stridulous piercing notes of the cicadae are perfectly deafening; a drab-colored cricket joins the chorus with a sharp sound, which has as little modulation as the drone of a Scottish bagpipe. I could not conceive how so small a thing could raise such a sound; it seemed to make the ground over it thrill. When cicadae, crickets, and frogs unite, their music may be heard at the distance of ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... blossomy. The clinging mire Shall never weary such an one, nor yet their loads O'ercome the beasts that serve him. Rock and rill Shall make the pleasant league go by as hours With secret tales they tell; the loosened stone, Sweet turf upturned, the bees' full-purposed drone, The hum of happy insects among flowers, And God's blue sky to crown each hill! Dawn with her jewel-throated birds To him shall be a new page in the Book That never had beginning nor shall end, And each increasing ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... gravel-crusher or a driver in the artillery you have to grin and abide; and the grin is apt to deteriorate into a grimace. You can become accustomed, if not reconciled, to shell-fire; but I personally never heard the drone of an enemy plane overhead without a prickly sensation down the spine and an urgent desire for a large dug-out forty feet below ground; and there were very few of these in Palestine. At one stage in the ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... cry rose above the drone of the millstones, and old Gabe stopped with open lips to listen. The boy's face was pressed close to the logs. A wet paddle had flashed into the sunlight from out the bushes across the river. He could just see a canoe in the shadows ...
— A Cumberland Vendetta • John Fox, Jr.
... methods of selecting the layers have been suggested which, while far from absolute, are of some significance and are well worth noting. The hen that sits upon the roost while other hens are out foraging, is probably a drone. The excessively fat or the excessively lean hens are not likely to be layers. It would naturally be supposed that the active laying hen would be the last one to go to roost at night. At the Kansas Experiment Station, the writer made observations upon ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... cover, and, pressing a pedal with one foot, gave forth the chords of her favorite, "How should I your true love know?" The organ had a rather sweet old tone, unlike the nasal and somewhat sanctimonious drone of most melodeons, and Felicia, hungry for the piano that had not been brought to Asquam, almost wished she could buy it. She remembered Ken's prophecy—"you'll come home with a melodeon"—and turned away, ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... There was nothing, absolutely nothing. I looked through the pile twice. A family reunion and they had not notified me! I had become as detached as all that! I glanced at Esther again. She was scratching away like mad. I heard the drone of a hurdy-gurdy outside. I would not stay here. The thought of a holiday in Irving Place became suddenly unendurable. I must escape it somehow. There was a train north an hour later. ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... she had voiced, and it became a trifle nobler when he considered that it meant industry, energy, and honesty. To do something and do it well. To be proud of doing something well. To be proud that one wasn't a loafer or a drone, or a parasite on the body economic. He was striving to correlate all this when made aware that the taxi had stopped and that they were at their destination. He actually submitted to an overcharge of a half-dollar ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... my Graunie summon, To say her prayers, douce, honest woman! Aft yont the dyke she's heard you bummin, Wi' eerie drone; Or, rustlin, thro' the boortries comin, Wi' ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... while they talked, and his rays were growing hot in the clear air. The mist had lifted from the city below, and all the streets and open places were alive with noisy buyers and sellers, whose loud talking and disputing came up in a continuous hum to the palace on the hill, like the drone of a swarm of bees. The queen ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... penetrate our chamber, and in the atmosphere of our room where night still lingers, they trace vague white rays. Soon, when the sun shall have risen, these rays will lengthen and become beautifully golden. The cocks and the cicalas make themselves heard, and now Madame Prune will begin her mystic drone. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... scratched the enemy's skin. The painter knew more about fencing than art. He was a champion with various weapons; he could box, and was even skilled in the favorite blows of the prize fighters of the slums. "Useless as a drone, and as dangerous, too," fretted his father. And yet in the back of his troubled mind fluttered an irresistible satisfaction—an animal pride in the thought that this hare-brained terror was ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... were not handsome, or who had not long beards, carried THEIR tapers anyhow, and abandoned themselves to spiritual contemplation. Meanwhile, the chaunting was very monotonous and dreary. The procession passed on, slowly, into the chapel, and the drone of voices went on, and came on, with it, until the Pope himself appeared, walking under a white satin canopy, and bearing the covered Sacrament in both hands; cardinals and canons clustered round him, making ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... deep in reflections excited by his cousin's words. He himself had always been a worker and a saver, George always a drone and a spender; and yet, if confiscation once began, it was he—the worker and the saver—who would be looted! That was the negation of all virtue, the overturning of all Forsyte principles. Could civilization be built on any other? He did not think so. Well, they wouldn't ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... eloquence! bless me! he had seen folk murmur politely in the Upper House, and drone or hammer away at the Speaker down below, with more heat ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... noble puller-down, is ambitious of becoming a setter-up, and a founder of schools and colleges out of the Abbey lands, and bishops' rents, and other spoils of Rome, which the nobility of Scotland have won with their sword and bow, and with which he would endow new hives to sing the old drone." ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... "It's a place where there's misery, starvation, and crime of all sorts,—and there I am in the very midst of it—just where I want to be. Ye see, I was meant to be a meenister—one of those douce, cannie, comfortable bodies that drone in the pulpit about predestination and original sin, and so forth a—sort, of palaver that does no good to ony resonable creature—an' if I had followed out this profession, I make nae doot that, with my aunt's seventy ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... welcomes me like an old friend. The tune that it sings is the same that the flowing water repeats all around the world. Not otherwise do the lively rapids carry the familiar air, and the larger falls drone out a burly bass, along the west branch of the Penobscot, or down the valley of the Bouquet. But here there are no forests to conceal the course of the stream. It lies as free to the view as a child's thought. As I follow on from pool to pool, picking out a good trout here and there, now ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... exist without a post or a position of any kind? Look around you at the works of God. Everything has its proper function, and pursues its proper course. Even a stone can be used for one purpose or another. How, then, can it be right for a man who is a thinking being to remain a drone?" ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... contributed fifty fresh verses, with which his visit to Percerin had inspired him; Loret, an article on the marvelous fetes he predicted; and Aramis, laden with his booty like the king of the bees, that great black drone, decked with purple and gold, re-entered his apartment, silent and busy. But before departing, "Remember, gentlemen," said he, "we leave ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... evenings sounded a very different music from that thin wheedling of April. It was now a soft steady vibration, the incessant drone and throb of locust and cricket, and sometimes the sudden rasp, dry and hard, of katydids. Gissing, in spite of his weariness, was all fidgets. He would walk round and round the house in the dark, unable to settle down to anything; tired, but incapable ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... a fiend for walking. And at the end of a twenty-mile hike in heavy marching order he would casually stroll alongside some sweating soldier and drone out, ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... thundered. "Have you again dared to save life, and neglect the object of our expedition? Fool! you will yet be driven forth as a drone from the hive. The girl's dead; throw her into the sea; she will be a dainty morsel ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... he began dreaming sounds. The notes of the bee's drone, one high, one low, combining in uneven rhythm, had given him a suggestion for an accompaniment. His mind was far away, working out his pattern of harmony, when another sound, actual, familiar, broke into his reverie—the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... cried out, with apparently no understanding of it, that things had come to a cruel pass, and back to the house she went; and I presently followed her to get my gun, having a mind to shoot a few wild fowl, since my pupil was at her wheel. And there the two sat, keeping up that gentle drone of industry which I have come to think of as a note of womanhood, like the hum of a bee or the purr of a cat or the call of a bird. They sat erect, the delicate napes of their necks showing above their muslin kerchiefs ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... thrown back against the wooden column of the porch, her hands clasped about her knees, smiling, smiling, always smiling. Sometimes she would hum a sort of low tuneless chant—it sounded like a pagan ritual of some sort, all repetitions, rising and falling in a monotonous, haunting drone. And once, as I stood watching her curiously, the word for that noise flashed suddenly into my ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... a cloud fly up From their sweet feeding in the fruit; The droning of the bees and flies Rises gradual as a lute; Is it for fear the birds are flown, And shrills the insect-drone? ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... you grudge me a pleasant night; you would drive me from this cosy spot! Was it not enough to have wrapped me in my winding-sheet and borne me to the grave? A greater power has lifted up the stone. In vain did your priests drone over the trench they dug for me. Of what use are salt and water, where burns the fire of youth? The earth cannot freeze up love. You made a promise; I have ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... working well, but not very well; the small difficulties will be got over, but I rather fear they will never draw the loads we expect of them. Still they promise to be a help, and they are a lively and attractive feature of our present scene as they drone along over the floe. At a little distance, without silencers, they sound exactly like ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... from sexual reproduction to the non-sexual formation of germ-cells (which most resembles it). It has been demonstrated to occur in many cases among insects, especially by Seebold's excellent investigations. Among the common bees, a male individual (a drone) arises out of the eggs of the queen, if the eggs have not been fructified; a female (a queen or working bee), if the ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... with paste-board furniture, and bits of colored tissue paper for rugs, and pieces of silk and linen from the rag-bag for bed-clothes; how they had hummed and whistled to themselves as they worked (she could hear them now!); and how the aromatic woodsy smell of the unfinished old room and the drone of the rain on the roof had been a part ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... the days of my youth went past. I still maintained my character as a drone and a dreamer. I used my time tramping the moorland with a gun, whipping the foamy pools of the burn for trout, or reading voraciously in the library. Mostly I read books of travel, and especially did ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... staidly conventional. Most of the stores were brick instead of wood with false fronts. The sidewalks were cement instead of boards. The main street was even paved. A sort of New England respectability and quietness hung over it. There was not a single saloon, and the drone of the little marble in the roulette wheel was gone from the land. Even the horses, hitched by drooping heads to racks, were scarce, and their place was taken by numerous tin automobiles of popular ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... Douglas, and other witless men amongst them, to hearken to any proposals of peace. Among others that Douglas, sitting on his horse, and preaching to the confused multitude, told them that they would come to terms with them, and like a drone was always droning on these terms with them: 'they would give us a half Christ, but we will have a whole Christ,' and such like impertinent speeches as these, good enough to feed those that are served with wind and not with the sincere milk ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Heilig was a drone if he were your son," replied Mrs. Brauner. She knew that if any one else had dared thus to attack their boy, his father would have been growling and snapping ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... the ranch meekly submissive, because Mary V had announced that she would be looking for him. Johnny winced from the thought of Mary V, out on the porch, watching the sky toward Tucson for the black speck that would be his airplane; listening for the high, strident drone that would herald his coming. She ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... a Bumblebee!— Ef you don't think they can sting—you'll see! They're lazy to look at, an' kindo' go Buzzin' an' bummin' aroun' so slow, An' ac' so slouchy an' all fagged out, Danglin' their legs as they drone about The hollyhawks 'at they can't climb in 'Ithout ist a-tumble-un out agin! Wunst I watched one climb clean 'way In a jim'son-blossom, I did, one day,— An' I ist grabbed it—an' nen let go— An' "Ooh-ooh! Honey! I told ye so!" Says The Raggedy Man; an' he ist run An' pullt out the stinger, ...
— Riley Child-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... once, of a still Sabbath morning, steeples in the fields and hills, and steeples in cities. The sound of splendid organs praying for the poor emptied people, the long, still, innumerable sound of countless collections being taken, the drone and seesaw of sermons, countless sermons! (Ah, these poor helpless Sundays!) Paper-philosophy and axioms. Chimes of bells to call the people to paper-philosophy and axioms! "Canst thou not," said I to my soul, "guide me to a Man, to a door that ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... and listened to that; it seemed a comment. Then a harsh quarrelling of dogs—Christian dogs—arose in the distance and died away, and again there was night and silence. Suddenly the long singing drone of a steamer's signal came across the city from the river, once, twice, thrice; and presently the sparrows began their twittering in the bushes near the verandah, an unexpected unanimous bird talk that died as suddenly and as irrelevantly away. A conservancy cart lumbered ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... middle of this square was the limp body of a deceased mongoose. At the opposite side of it was a Mahometan school, where the children were instructed in the Koran, and their treble voices as they recited the inspired verses in unison kept up drone for hours. The build and surroundings of the hostelry left much opening for improvement, but we had no valid ground for complaint. The beds were clean, Bruzeaud was a good cook, the waiter was attentive and smiled perpetually, ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... fro in it. The only customer in the room was an old retired military man drinking tea in a corner. But there was the usual bustle going on in the other rooms of the tavern; there were shouts for the waiters, the sound of popping corks, the click of billiard balls, the drone of the organ. Alyosha knew that Ivan did not usually visit this tavern and disliked taverns in general. So he must have come here, he reflected, simply to meet Dmitri by arrangement. Yet ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of the writer's profound sincerity, or of his earnest desire to make proselytes. He knows his own mind, and hammers his doctrines out with a hard and iterative stroke that hits its mark. Yet his literary tone, in spite of its declamatory pitch, not seldom sinks into a drone. Holbach's contemporaries were in too fierce contact with the tusks and hooked claws of the Church, to have any mind for the rhythm of a champion's sentences or the turn of his periods. But now that the efforts ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Sack! Canary! Malmsey! Muscadel!"— As the last canto ceased, the Mermaid Inn Chorussed. I flew from laughing voice to voice; But, over all the hubbub, rose the drone Of Francis Bacon,—"Now, this Muscovy Is a cold clime, not favourable to bees (Or love, which is a weakness of the south) As well might be supposed. Yet, as hot lands Gender hot fruits and odoriferous spice, In this case we may think that honey and flowers Are ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... importance among the butternuts, but this is pure priggishness. When the passer-by is gone he ceases chattering and climbs back to where the little breezes can stir his tail-plumes. From somewhere under the lazy fold of a meadow comes the drone of a mowing-machine among the hay—its whurr-oo and the grunt of ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... Luneburg heath and those of this country!"..."Removing an old queen and substituting a young one of the current year is here an infallible mode of keeping the strongest stock from swarming and preventing drone-breeding; whilst the same means if adopted in Hanover would certainly be of no avail." I procured a hive full of dead bees from Jamaica, where they have long been naturalised, and, on carefully comparing them under the microscope with my ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... to counterfeit impotency, and his practice to cozen simplicity of charity. The juice of the malt is the liquor of his life, and at bed and at board a louse is his companion. He fears no such enemy as a constable, and being acquainted with the stocks, must visit them as he goes by them. He is a drone that feeds upon the labours of the bee, and unhappily begotten that is born for no goodness. His staff and his scrip are his walking furniture, and what he lacks in meat he will have out in drink. He ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... letters of strange form, arrowy, lance-like, like leaning sheaves, and crouching baboons, and kicking jackasses, and cocks a-crow, and lutes slack-strung; and she knelt and mumbled over and over words of magic, like the drone of a bee to hear, and as a roll of water, nothing distinguishable. After that she sought for an unguent of a red colour, and smeared it on a part of the floor by the corner of the room, and wrote ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... various denominations, were armed with sticks, blunderbusses, anything they could snatch up at a moment's notice; and some of them were not unacquainted with fighting. Dire silence prevailed among the men, but the women shouted as they ran, and the curious army moved forward to the drone and squall of drum and pipe. The enemy was sighted on the level land of Cabbylatch, and here, while the intending combatants glared at each other, a well-known local magnate galloped his horse between them and ordered them in the name of the king to return to their ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... presence, and lit by a cheerful fire, time and again. Do not think me insincere when I assure you they were the most delightful ones I ever passed. If you find time to write a line to one who is now a worker in the hive instead of a drone, it will be ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... too late at night, but this London moved with the decorum and caution of an undertaker. There was a silence, and yet there was no silence. There was a low drone, perhaps a humming contributed inevitably by closely-gathered thousands, and yet on second thoughts it was to me silence. I had perched my ears for the note of London, the sound made simply by the existence ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... a space at his cigar in silence. The quiet drone of the engines came up from below, and the moonlight fell in a broad band of radiance on the foaming ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... with nervous, mincing steps, and nostrils aquiver. From her place beside the corral, the girl watched in astonishment as man and horse passed from sight. From the black interior of the stable the voice of the Texan sounded its monotonous drone, and presently the man himself appeared and taking the lantern returned to attend to the horse. Alone in the darkness, Janet wondered. She knew the big blue roan, and she had expected a fight. A few minutes later the man reappeared, chuckling: ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... themselves into a small space between the glass and the comb, where the bees could not get hold of them or where they seemed to be overlooked in the general slaughter. They will also crawl outside and hide under the edges of the hive. But sooner or later they are all killed or kicked out. The drone makes no resistance, except to pull back and try to get away; but (putting yourself in his place) with one bee a-hold of your collar or the hair of your head, and another a-hold of each arm or leg, and still another feeling for your waistbands ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... silver, and snowy covers of the supper room were visible. Here a high-light gleamed upon a bare shoulder; there, a stalwart male back showed, blocked out in bold black upon the bright canvas. Waiters flitted noiselessly about. The drone of that vocal orchestra filled the place: the masculine conversation, the brass and wood-wind—the sweeter tones of women, the ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... I'll do after college! I'll get my hands on one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful. Be an inspiration. I suppose I'd better become a teacher then, but—I won't be that kind of a teacher. I won't drone. Why should they have all the garden suburbs on Long Island? Nobody has done anything with the ugly towns here in the Northwest except hold revivals and build libraries to contain the Elsie books. I'll make 'em put in a village green, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... any honest occupation,—only he could not work with the workers and flutter with the butterflies. MacRae, walking down the street, communing with himself, knew that he must pay a penalty for working with his hands. If he were a drone in uniform—necessarily a drone since the end of war—he could dance and play, flirt with pretty girls, be a welcome guest in great houses, make the heroic past ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the paragon that some writers have pictured, she was a splendid home-loving American woman, brave in heart and helpful to her husband, neither a drone nor a drudge—in the true Scriptural sense a worthy woman who sought wool and flax and worked willingly with her hands. As such her price was ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... of the Eternal City with a mimicry of pagan festivals, while art went hand in hand with luxury. It seemed as though Bacchus and Pallas and Priapus would be reinstated in their old realm, and yet Rome had not ceased to call herself Christian. The hoarse rhetoric of friars in the Coliseum, and the drone of pifferari from the Ara Coeli, mingled with the Latin declamations of the Capitol and the twang of lute-strings in the Vatican. Meanwhile, amid crowds of Cardinals in hunting-dress, dances of half-naked girls, and masques ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... were freely handed about; so that half-an-hour which passed before the sermon began was agreeably spent. In the meanwhile, mass was being celebrated in the main hall of the temple, and the monotonous nasal drone of the plain chant was faintly heard in the distance. So soon as this was over, the lay clerk sat himself down by the hanging drum, and, to its accompaniment, began intoning the prayer, "Na Mu Miyo Ho Ren ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... earth was visible at the bottom of the air, enormous, dark, and solid, rising into the tapering mass of the mountain, and pricked here and there on the slopes by the tiny lights of villas. The driving air, the drone of the trees, and the flashing light which now and again spread a broad illumination over the earth filled Mrs. Flushing with exultation. Her breasts rose ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... have had a certain vigor; but to be nearly refined without being quite refined is as harrowing as singing just a little off the key. To be far off the key is to be in another key, but to smite at a note and muff it is excruciation. Better far to drone middle C than to aim at high C and miss it ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... man looked about him and then, since the drone of voices was again gathering volume he replied: "Oh, ye're right liable ter meet up with a ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... assemblage as might have come together in the time of the Terror at midnight in the Place du Greve. The single note of strong colour—all the more effective because it was a very trumpet-blast above the drone of bees—was a brilliant splash of red running half-way around the mid-height: the crimson draperies in front of the three tiers set apart for the ministerial party and the Felibres. And for a roof over all was the dark star-set ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... to have been a scandalous pluralist, restless and greedy, continually seeking and obtaining additional preferment, and as often being forced to resign. He was not the man to prosecute such a work as was to be done at Burgh; "he lived even as a drone in a hive; as the drone eateth and draggeth forward to himself all that is brought near, even so did he."[8] It is likely that for eight years after the death of John de Sais nothing was done to advance the building. But the Prior of S. Neots, Martin de Bee, who was appointed to succeed Henry, ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... be protested, however, that this is an incomplete account of Mr. Kipling's genius as a poet. He does something more in his verse, it may be urged, than drone on the harmonium of Imperialism, and transmute the language of the Ratcliff Road into polite literature. That is quite true. He owes his fame partly also to the brilliance with which he talked adventure and talked "shop" to a generation that was exceptionally greedy for both. He, more than any other ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... the lantern on a table, dropped wearily upon a rough bench before it and looked at the jars beside him, lifted his hand and opened a compact, but thoroughly efficient field wireless "set." His right fingers dropped to the key, and the whining drone of the wireless rose higher and higher as he tuned up. He reached for his receivers, ducked his head and adjusted them with one hand, and sent a call spitting tiny blue sparks from the key ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... burdened by So many a fool, so many a drone, Whose thoughts and deeds are all awry— These trees of flesh, these forms of ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... they call me rich in trade? Little care I, but hear the shorn priest drone, And watch my silk-clad lovers, man by maid, ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... before him Sang in their Norman orchards and bright Burgundian vineyards. Close at her father's side was the gentle Evangeline seated, Spinning flax for the loom that stood in the corner behind her. Silent awhile were its treadles, at rest was its diligent shuttle, While the monotonous drone of the wheel, like the drone of a bagpipe, Followed the old man's song, and united the fragments together. As in a church, when the chant of the choir at intervals ceases, Footfalls are heard in the aisles, or words of the priest at the altar, ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... women moved to the open window, through which came the drone of bees and the distant music ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... longer live in the cottage Stuart built on the hills. A jaunty sailboat nods at the buoy near the water's edge. The drone of bees from the fruit trees in full bloom on the terraces promise a luscious harvest in the summer and fall. The lawn is a wilderness of flowers and shimmering green. The climbing roses on the southeastern side of the house have ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... perverting, and mystifying, called education, is quite another. We have had women enough befooled under the one system, pray let us try the other. The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be "a hand, not a mouth"; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession. Woman has relied heretofore too entirely for her support on the needle—that one-eyed demon of destruction that slays ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... ancient than the event which it recorded;" and that there is with it a paper which shows that an attempt was made in the last century (17th) to give it a modern dress, but that too many liberties had been taken with the melody, and the drone bass, which had been set to it for the lute, is a mere jargon. He then presents what he says is a faithful copy of this venerable relic of our nation's prowess ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... No drone must hide himself under those eaves; Who sows not, will in harvest reap no sheaves. The slothful man himself, may plainly see, That honey's gotten by the working bee. But here's no work for life, that's freely given; Meat, drink, and cloths, and life, we have from heav'n; Work's here enjoined, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Along the rail; and deep the drone Of insects makes the country lone With summer where the water sleeps: She hears him singing as he swings His scythe—who thinks of other things Than toil, and, ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... instead of going to sleep he began talking to Piegan, asking what seemed to me a lot of rather trifling questions. I was nearly worn out, and their conversation was nowise interesting to me, so listening to the monotonous drone of their voices and the steady beat of falling ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... so fertile in. I count it as one of the most spontaneous gavottes of modern times, one that is buoyant with the afflation of the olden days. It carries a musette of which old Father Bach need not have felt ashamed,—one of the most ingenious examples of a drone-bass ever written. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... to cover the world with the grey whiteness of a whitewashed ceiling. There was no freshness or fragrance in the air. On such a day even British workmen scarcely cared to do more then they were obliged, and moved about their business without the drone of talk which whiles ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... banishment, See Aristides leave the land he saved: Wisdom his fault and justice his offense. See Caesar crowned a god and Tully slain; See Paris red with riot and noble blood, A king beheaded and a monster throned,— King Drone, flat fool that weather-cocked all winds, Gulped gall and vinegar and smacked it wine, Wig-wagged his way from gilded Oeil de Boeuf Through mob and maelstrom to the guillotine. Chateaus up-blazing torch the doom of France, While human wolves howl ruin round their walls. Contention hisses from ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... oeil de boeuf through which this song had come, and beyond, the upper courses of cable, the blue haze, and the pendant fabric of the lights of the public ways. He heard the song break into a tumult of voices and cease. But now he perceived quite clearly the drone and tumult of the moving platforms and a murmur of many people. He had a vague persuasion that he could not account for, a sort of instinctive feeling that outside in the ways a huge crowd' must be watching this place in which their Master amused himself. He wondered ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... if, like a drone, we have but a single task in existence: to live. A drone must die, when it has performed its mission. I am not at all blind to the beauty of the butterfly, which lets its magnificent velvet wings glisten in the ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... machines, enormous dynamos, cathode tubes a hundred feet long, masses and mountains of such fantastic apparatus as he had never encountered. The air was bluish, electric. From the black substance came a phosphorescent radiance. The triumphant drone of motors and a terrific crackle of electricity were everywhere. Off to his right purple-blue flames the size of Sequoia trees flickered around a group of what looked like condensers as huge as Gibraltar. At the base of the central tower half a mile ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... be quite an unsupportable place. Then, after all, it was a ridiculous position to be smoked out of your fortune with brimstone as soon as you had made it. You would have a very mean opinion of a Manchester man if he spun cotton for no other purpose. He must say he thought a drone the embodiment of a pleasanter and wiser idea. The drone said unaffectedly, "You will excuse me; I really cannot attend to the shop! I find myself in a world in which there is so much to see and so ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... and always will be the same. The old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden; and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, and you will find the poets ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... and gleaming meadows, Where the slaying hours behold thee, From the forests whose slim shadows, Brown and leafless cannot fold thee, Through the cedar lands aflame With gold light that cleaves and quivers, Songs that winter may not tame, Drone of pines and laugh of rivers. May thy passing joyous be To thy father, the great sea, For the sun is getting stronger; Earth hath need of thee no longer; Go, kind snow, God-speed ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... into the parlour, took the book from the shelf, put it on the table within the little circle of light cast by a shaded candle, and began. It was dull enough, though I had borne such tribulations before, and the drone of my aunt's voice would have sent me to sleep, as it had done at other times, even in a straight-backed chair, had I not been so full of my discovery, and chafed at this delay. Thus all the time my aunt read of spiritualities and saving grace, I had my mind on diamonds and all kinds of mammon, ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... weight of the dense mass surging along its center. And then to add to the terror of the moment there was heard above the shouts and oaths of the struggling mob a low, foreboding hum, the characteristic drone of Austrian aeroplanes. It is hard to see what could have come of the situation but complete and bloody disaster if it had not been for the decided action of some Italian officers. By main force they thrust into the middle of the entrance to the bridge and checked ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... never minding me nor your numerous family. Don't you hear how Lord Strutt has bespoke his liveries at Lewis Baboon's shop? Don't you see how that old fox steals away your customers, and turns you out of your business every day, and you sit like an idle drone, with your hands in your pockets? Fie upon it. Up, man, rouse thyself; I'll sell to my shift before I'll be so used by that knave."[178] You must think Mrs. Bull had been pretty well tuned up by Frog, who chimed in with her ...
— English Satires • Various
... graves on the sand banks increased. For a second winter the dreary snowfall wrapped the island in a mantle white as death sheet. Then came the same weary monotony,—the frenzied seal hunt over the blood-stained floes; the long summer days with the drone of the tide on the sand banks; the men mad with hope at sight of a sail peak over the far wave tops, only to be plunged in despair as the fisher boat passed too far for signal; the fading of the grasses to russet in the sad autumn light; then ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... filled with the incessant hum in various notes, now the busy hum of the working bee flying quickly off, then the blaring of the lazy drone, and the excited buzz of the bees on guard protecting their property from the enemy and preparing to sting. On the farther side of the fence the old bee-keeper was shaving a hoop for a tub, and he did not see Levin. Levin ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... decision on the evidence of the medical expert. Then the secretary arose and began to read the indictment, loud and with distinctness, but so rapidly that his incorrect sounding of the letters l and r turned his reading into one continuous, weary drone. The judges leaned now on one side, now on the other side of their arm-chairs, then on the table, and again on the backs of the chairs, or closed their eyes, or opened them and whispered to each other. One of the gendarmes several ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... a prayer-book, and while he kept one eye on the whirring, humming wheels he kept the other on the good book, which he read by the flickering light of a candle set on a table. So the hours at first passed quietly with nothing to disturb him but the monotonous drone and click of the machinery. But on the stroke of twelve, as he was still reading with the axe lying on the table within reach, the door opened and in came two grey cats mewing, an old one and a young one. They sat down opposite him, but it was easy ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... the time when every bee That booms in every bonnet, Shall find a chair of Apiary, And drone long lectures on it. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... green;—and bid thee hear, In yon irriguous vale, the Blackbird clear, At measur'd intervals, with mellow tone, Choiring [1]the hours of prime? and call thine ear To the gay viol dinning in the dale, With tabor loud, and bag-pipe's rustic drone To merry Shearer's dance;—or jest retail From festal board, from choral roofs the song; And speak of Masque, or Pageant, to beguile The caustic memory of a cruel wrong?— Thy lips acknowledge this a generous wile, And bid me still the effort kind prolong; But ah! they ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... went up to God,—only thrust her hand deep into the snow where his foot had been, with a quick, fierce tenderness, blushing as she drew it back, as if she had forgotten herself, and from her heart caressed him. She heard a sound at the other side of a bend in the hill, a low drone, like somebody ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... to the diddling drone of Piqueur's quavering voice. In the clear sweetness of the May morning above the twittering of the birds it raised itself, the quaint measures delighting her ears. Even in Piqueur's thin falsetto ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... half-drawn velvet hangings and laid a faintly illumined path across the ambassador's desk; the heavy leather chairs were mere impalpable splotches in the shadows; the cut-glass knobs of a mahogany cabinet caught the glint of light and reflected it dimly. Outside was the vague, indefinable night drone of a city asleep, unbroken by any sound that was distinguishable, until finally there came the distant boom of a clock. It ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... long time on the station platform, in the dark, glowering at the lights of the town, then started abruptly and made his way into the gambling room of the Plaza, where he somberly watched the players. The rattle of chips, the whir of the wheel, the monotonous drone of the faro dealer, the hum of voices, some eager, some tense, others exultant or grumbling, the incessant jostling, irritated him. He went out the front door, stepped down into the street, and walked eastward. Passing an open space between two buildings he became aware of the ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... were none to be had here at Linderman, he would probably have to return to Dyea. That would delay him seriously— enough, perhaps, so that the jaws of winter would close down upon him. Through the drone of pattering drops there came the faint sound of a cough. Mr. Linton sat up in bed. "Pneumonia!" he exclaimed. Well, Jerry was getting exactly what he deserved. He had called him, Tom, an "old fool," a "dam' old fool," to be precise. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... paused, for there was a distinct movement of surprise among his audience, which till now, had remained to a man so still that the buzz of a fly on the window-pane sounded almost as loud as the drone of a bag-pipe,—then with a faint smile on ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... him, and was most happily endowed with wealth and good looks also. When he left for Canada they were inwardly glad (they imagined that something might occur to end the engagement)—all except Richard, the wiseacre of the family, the book- man, the drone, who preferred living at Greyhope, their Hertfordshire home, the year through, to spending half the time in Cavendish Square. Richard was very fond of Frank, admiring him immensely for his buxom strength and cleverness, and not a little, too, for that very rashness which had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... he, 'shake up that drone and drunkard, Carlton; tell him that his master directs that the travelling carriage shall be ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... young man had charge of the meeting, and he stood, with a sort of embarrassed dignity, on the little platform behind the desk. He was reading a selection from the Bible. Maria heard him drone out in a scarcely audible voice: "Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth," and then she heard, in a quick response, a soft sob from the seat behind her. She knew who sobbed: Mrs. Jasper Cone, who had lost her baby the week before. The odor of crape came ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... his knees in grass and weeds. The air was hot and sticky and heavily charged with a shimmering white water vapour. There were a few sluggish clouds with sombre centres hanging about the valley to the southwest, and there was a drone and zip of flying creatures in swarms above the drying weeds and stubble. Coming to a large oak tree standing solitary in that wasting field, he threw himself face downward on the ground in its shadow, careless that the grass ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... night, and Trumet sidewalks were uneven and hard to navigate. But she stumbled on, up the main road to the Corners, down the "Turn-off," past the chapel of the Come-Outers, from the open window of which sounded the drone of a high, nasal voice. Josiah Badger was "testifying," and Keziah caught a fragment of the ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... to take the diminishing drug. From across the room there came a very queer sound. A scuttling, scratching, and the drone of wings. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... nature—and who has the courage to avow himself aught else?—the sea-shore can never be monotonous. The swirl and sweep of ever-shifting waters, the flying mist of foam breaking away into a gray and ghostly distance down the beach, the eternal drone of ocean, mingling itself with one's talk by day and with the light dance-music in the parlors by night—all these are active sources of a passive pleasure. And to lie at length upon the tawny sand, watching, through half-closed eyes, the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... the old lady's lean fingers clinched into his arm; her eyes grew bright; her mouth opened and she stopped in the middle of her drone. Jerome grew rigid. And no wonder. From the middle of the room not ten feet away came the tone of a bell, a great silvery voluminous sound—and music. A church bell. Just one stroke, full toned, filling all the air till the whole room was choked with music. Then as suddenly it died ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... tribute to his own high mightiness and consideration. Whatever is revolt against her immediate indolence and efficiency, his ideal is nearly always a situation in which she will figure as a magnificent drone, a sort of empress without portfolio, entirely discharged from every unpleasant labour ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... ceased. The humble-bees' drone again became ascendant—a sudden fear seized him. She was GOING; he should never see her! While he had stood there a dolt and sluggard, she had satisfied her curiosity and stolen away. With a sudden yielding to impulse, he darted quickly in the direction where he had heard her ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... He marries, sets his wives to hoe the mealies and milk the cows, and thereafter takes life easy, except when he takes a fancy to hunt elephants, or to go to war for pastime. Ever after he is a drone in the world's beehive. Having no necessity he need not work, and possessing no ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... hast bowed thy neck to imperial pride and priestly craft, thou who has suffered sorely even to this hour, from Nero down to Pio Nono, the days of thine oppression are over. Gone from thy enfranchised ways for ever is the clang of the praetorian cohorts and the more odious drone of meddling monks!" And yet, as Mackinnon observed, there still stood the dirty friars and the small French soldiers, and there still toiled the slow priests, wending their tedious way up to the ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... — N. cry &c. v.; crying &c. v.; bowwow, ululation, latration[obs3], belling; reboation[obs3]; wood-note; insect cry, fritiniancy|, drone; screech owl; cuckoo. wailing (lamentation) 839. V. cry, roar, bellow, blare, rebellow[obs3]; growl, snarl. [specific animal sounds] bark [dog, seal]; bow-wow, yelp [dog]; bay, bay at the moon [dog, wolf]; yap, yip, yipe, growl, yarr|, yawl, snarl, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... copies of some memoranda which I have. To give all would take more room than I can spare. In looking these memoranda over the greatest gratification I feel comes from the evident fact that I was not a drone, but tried to do my duty. And fifty years further along in our nation's history it may be a satisfaction to my then ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith
... heard a steady, humming drone, like a swarm of angry bees—felt a peculiar, soothing warmth about his head; ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... etchings and sonatas and bits of carved ivory, not to speak of the men who created those things, and who were of no practical use to the community in which they lived. And the workmen in the factories listened to the drone of their engines until they too had lost all taste for the melody of the flute or fiddle of their peasant ancestry. The arts became the step-children of the new industrial era. Art and Life became entirely ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... had been silent for a minute, and the curate's voice had begun to drone within the building. The rivals were alone, and nobody was ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... savoured, she would have found him quite a romantic person. In the actuality she felt as frigid as if his marble forehead was chilling her, and what she remembered most acutely was his fishlike gasping. Then, too, the contradictoriness of his social attitude, his desire to make her a rich drone, his shame at his mother, his reclusive shyness—all the weaknesses of the man—came to obscure her sense of his literary idealism, if not, indeed, to reveal it as a mere coquetry with fine ideas and coarse clothes. And then for a moment the humour of being Mrs. Maper's ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... Mr. Smith II The Speculations of Jefferson Thorpe III The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias IV The Ministrations of the Rev. Mr. Drone V The Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa VI The Beacon on the Hill VII The Extraordinary Entanglement of Mr. Pupkin VIII The Fore-ordained Attachment of Zena Pepperleigh and Peter Pupkin IX The Mariposa Bank Mystery X The Great ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... gentleman, and evidently a tobie-man with a wide range of activities. Out of mere vacancy of mind I walked near to read the fly-sheet again, and, by a curious chance, among the drone of words from the other room, the only one my quick ear could pick out distinctly ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... circumspection and caution, the sliding panel, listened for a moment to the low murmur of their lordships' voices, waited until each of his men had gone stealthily behind the tapestry, listened again and still heard the drone of speech, he returned as he came, and accompanied by a guard of two score, escorted the Empress to the broad public stairway that led up one flight to the door of the Wahlzimmer. The two sentinels at the foot of the ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... gold. Thou shouldst not have heaped and hidden it here, Till the breath of Battle was hot and near, But have sown through the land these useless hoards To spring into shining blades of swords, And keep thine honour sweet and clear. * * * * * Then into his dungeon I locked the drone, And left him to feed there all alone In the honey-cells of his golden hive: Never a prayer, nor a cry, nor a groan Was heard from those massive walls of stone, Nor again was the Kalif seen alive.' This is the story, strange and true, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... above another, making with their white shifting flakes the outline of a shattered marble column above the tallest flowers; the glass roofs of the palm house shone as if a whole market full of shiny green umbrellas had opened in the sun; and in the drone of the aeroplane the voice of the summer sky murmured its fierce soul. Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... The humble-bees' drone again became ascendant—a sudden fear seized him. She was GOING; he should never see her! While he had stood there a dolt and sluggard, she had satisfied her curiosity and stolen away. With a sudden yielding to impulse, he darted quickly ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... set, The field to be won; What foes have you met, What work have you done? To courage alone Does victory come; To coward and drone Nor country nor home! ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... green apples blush, Before green nuts embrown, Why, one day in the country Is worth a month in town; Is worth a day and a year Of the dusty, musty, lag-last fashion That days drone elsewhere. ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... Manaos. Outside lay the yellow, brassy glare of the sunshine, with the shadows of the palm trees as black and definite as the trees themselves. The air was calm, full of the eternal hum of insects, a tropical chorus of many octaves, from the deep drone of the bee to the high, keen pipe of the mosquito. Beyond the veranda was a small cleared garden, bounded with cactus hedges and adorned with clumps of flowering shrubs, round which the great blue butterflies and the tiny humming-birds fluttered and darted in crescents of sparkling light. Within ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... mother remembers a bishop whom she met at Lucerne, the Indian officer gets back by the Ghauts to the Schreckhorn, the graduate finds his way again through 'Manfred' to the precipices. In an instant the drone recommences, the cataract pours down again, and there is nothing for it but to wander out on the terrace of six feet by four, and wonder what the view would be ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... accomplishes what he surely shall accomplish, when the roar of mill machinery begins to reverberate through the hills of the future Joplin, arousing the vast energies and resources of We-all, Pewee and Big Wheat, let us be generous. If there was a sponge, kicker, shirk or drone, let us cover his selfishness with the mantle of charity. Leave him under the beating light of progress to wrestle with whatever remnant of a conscience he may happen to have. If he can stand by and coolly watch us work our gizzards out for the common good, and then ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... experience of the dame, How hard a task it is to quench her flame; And who falls short of furnishing a course Up to his brawny predecessor's force, With utmost rage from her embraces thrown, Remains convicted as an empty drone. Thus often, to his shame, a pert beginner Proves in the end a miserable sinner. As for our youngster, I am apt to doubt him, With all the vigour of his youth about him; But he, more sanguine, trusts in one and twenty, And impudently hopes ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... evidence of the medical expert. Then the secretary arose and began to read the indictment, loud and with distinctness, but so rapidly that his incorrect sounding of the letters l and r turned his reading into one continuous, weary drone. The judges leaned now on one side, now on the other side of their arm-chairs, then on the table, and again on the backs of the chairs, or closed their eyes, or opened them and whispered to each other. One of the gendarmes several times ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... what I have is my own, if labour in getting, and care in augmenting, can make a right of property; and no drone shall feed on my honeycomb. Think on it well: what I have said is not without reflection, and what I ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... seen, therefore, that all young persons should endeavor to make each day stand for something. Neither heaven nor earth has any place for the drone; he is a libel on his species. No glamour of wealth or social prestige can hide his essential ugliness. It is better to carry a hod, or wield a shovel, in an honest endeavor to be of some use to humanity, than to be nursed in ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... "My prospects are of the dreariest nature. You will give me the living of Trewinion when Mr. Polperrow dies, and I shall drone out my life on your bounty. Ah! The thought ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... was done. Whether it was a continuous supply of peat for the fire in these chilly April days; or a newspaper from the town; or a bundle of daffodils from the wood below—some signs of a fatherly mind he was always showing towards this little drone in the hive. And Laura delighted in him—racked her brains to keep him ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... heavy, dull, cold thing, The spirit of evil well may be: A drone too base to have a sting; 345 Who gluts, and grimes his lazy wing, And ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... ourselves—shall we never heed the teachings of Philosophy (unless perchance they have been sounding in our ears like and enchanter's drone):— ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... the breadwinner, because you are a drone, an idle, worthless fellow. You are not fit to associate with us. You are no father of ...
— The Liberty Boys Running the Blockade - or, Getting Out of New York • Harry Moore
... length of the train conversation, no longer drowned by the motion, rose and fell in a kind of drone, out of which occasional scraps of talk from the nearer carriages were more distinctly audible, until there came a general lull as each party gave way to the temptation of listening to the other—for the dullest talk has an extraordinary piquancy under these circumstances, ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... shut his eyes, with an air of a man who is going a long journey in a post-chaise. Mr. Baron Garrow dipped his pen into an invisible ink-pot, and scratched it on his desk. A long story began to drone from under the wig, an interminable farrago of dull nonsense, in a hypochondriacal voice; a long tale about piracy in general; piracy in the times of the Greeks, piracy in the times of William the Conqueror... pirata nequissima Eustachio, and ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... she took an unguent, and traced with it characters on the two circles, and letters of strange form, arrowy, lance-like, like leaning sheaves, and crouching baboons, and kicking jackasses, and cocks a-crow, and lutes slack-strung; and she knelt and mumbled over and over words of magic, like the drone of a bee to hear, and as a roll of water, nothing distinguishable. After that she sought for an unguent of a red colour, and smeared it on a part of the floor by the corner of the room, and wrote on it in silver fluid ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... coverlet And pillow for the baby's head; And pray Thou, may The door stand open and the day Send ever in a gentle breeze, With fragrance from the locust-trees, And drowsy moan of doves, and blur Of robin-chirps, and drone of bees, With after-hushes of the stir Of intermingling sounds, and then The good-wife and the smile of her Filling the silences again— The cricket's call And the wee cot, Dear Lord ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... bedecked, drenched in her own blood. A small clasp knife lay by her side, and there was a ghastly gash in her throat. The women lifted her up, and strove to staunch the bleeding, and as they fought to stay the life that was ebbing from her, the drone of the priests, and the beat of the drums, came to their ears from the men who were making merry without. Then suddenly the news of what had occurred spread among the guests, and the music died away, and was replaced by a babble of excited ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... this, Erlon?" he thundered. "Have you again dared to save life, and neglect the object of our expedition? Fool! you will yet be driven forth as a drone from the hive. The girl's dead; throw her into the sea; she will be a dainty ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... the fool, thinking. "Since Eve fell into sin, women's counsel is often the best. You, Nunkey, shall be turned into a butterfly, and not into a drone, and grace the flowers ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... furtive visits. The intense stillness of the night, broken by an occasional rustling in the grass or the hedge; the smell of the flowers in the garden beyond; the distant drone of the sea. ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... a little distance, and, seating themselves on the ground, began to talk together, and after a while to drone some strange chant in unison. The executioners and the guards also sat down not far away, laughing, chatting, and passing a horn of snuff from hand to hand. Indeed, I observed that the captain of them even took some snuff to ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... to do, you mean, you lazy Cat! You are a good-for-nothing drone. Do you know what we do to our drones? We kill them; and that is all they are fit for. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... dull drone of the heavy stuff—the practised ear could gauge its fall, and I retreated a few yards into the passage. The courtyard outside caught it, and the entire chateau trembled violently at the concussion. But why, why these big guns? Another landed in the yard, followed by an unearthly ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... front uncrowned, Whose hand holds crownets; playmate swart o' the strong; Tenebrous moon that flux and refluence draws Of the high-tided man; skull-hous-ed asp That stings the heel of kings; true Fount of Youth, Where he that dips is deathless; being's drone-pipe; Whose nostril turns to blight the shrivelled stars, And thicks the lusty breathing of the sun; Pontifical Death, that doth the crevasse bridge To the steep and trifid God; one mortal birth That broker is of ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... Virgil's advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. And when the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... to say horrible, as he recalled one of his pet abominations, a dirty, kilted and plaided Scotchman, who made night hideous about the Bloomsbury squares with his chanter and drone. ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... of the supper room were visible. Here a high-light gleamed upon a bare shoulder; there, a stalwart male back showed, blocked out in bold black upon the bright canvas. Waiters flitted noiselessly about. The drone of that vocal orchestra filled the place: the masculine conversation, the brass and wood-wind—the sweeter tones of women, the violins; their laughter, ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... looked about him and then, since the drone of voices was again gathering volume he replied: "Oh, ye're right liable ter meet up with a driftin' lumberjack ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... seminary bride had fallen sick on the voyage. He perceived the teeming harbor clogged with junks and house-boats, the muddy river, an artery out of the heart of darkness, the fantastic, colored shore-lines, the vast, dull drone of heathendom stirring in his ears, the temple gongs calling blindly to the blind, the alluring and incomprehensible accents of the boatmen's tongue which he was to have made his own and lightened with the fierce sweet name of the Cross—and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... eyes. Yes, the judge would like to know. A vagueness comes into his precise mind. He half-hears the familiar accusation that the policeman drones, a terribly matter-of-fact drone. ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... and ditches, 510 To make them dip themselves, and sound For Christendom in dirty pond To dive like wild-fowl for salvation, And fish to catch regeneration. This light inspires and plays upon 515 The nose of Saint like bag-pipe drone, And speaks through hollow empty soul, As through a trunk, or whisp'ring hole, Such language as no mortal ear But spirit'al eaves-droppers can hear: 520 So PHOEBUS, or some friendly muse, Into small poets song infuse, Which they at second-hand rehearse, Thro' ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... heaven, Roll back her outrage, and indignant shed The world's wide vengeance on her sevenfold head. Then dwindling back to littleness and shade Man soon forgets the gorgeous glare he made, Sinks to a savage serf or monkish drone, Roves in rude hordes or counts his beads alone, Wars with his arts, obliterates his lore, And burns the books that rear'd ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... Gregorian notes, and can be little less ancient than the event which it recorded;" and that there is with it a paper which shows that an attempt was made in the last century (17th) to give it a modern dress, but that too many liberties had been taken with the melody, and the drone bass, which had been set to it for the lute, is a mere jargon. He then presents what he says is a faithful copy of this venerable relic of ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... vague way, a tribute to his own high mightiness and consideration. Whatever is revolt against her immediate indolence and efficiency, his ideal is nearly always a situation in which she will figure as a magnificent drone, a sort of empress without portfolio, entirely discharged from every unpleasant labour ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... arrears of pay, oft promised, And murmur deeply—any hope of change Will draw them forward: they shall pay themselves With plunder:—but the priests—I doubt the priesthood Will not be with us; they have hated me Since that rash hour, when, maddened with the drone, I smote the tardy Bishop at Treviso,[391] 310 Quickening his holy march; yet, ne'ertheless, They may be won, at least their Chief at Rome, By some well-timed concessions; but, above All things, I must ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... grand in life, that is glorious in thought, depend upon our own exertions. This is as true of women as of men. Then the idler is a leech on himself—his own despoiler. An idle woman is as base a thing as an idle man. She was made for usefulness. A drone in any hive is a base bee—a nuisance, a leech, ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... young Wegg, "reminds me of a plan I've had in mind for some time. I find I've too much time on my hands, Mr. Merrick, and I cannot be thoroughly happy unless I'm occupied. Ethel's farms are let on shares and I'm a drone in the world's busy hive. But we're anchored here at Millville, so I've been wondering what I could do to improve the place and keep myself busy. It has seemed to me that the same rush of water in Little Bill Creek that runs the dynamos ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... A human life will drone along uneventfully for years with scarce a perceptible progress, retrogression, or change; and then suddenly, with a few leaps, will cover more of alteration and event in a week than it has passed through ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... rigging to a burring drone that rose to a shriek in the shuddering gusts. The crests of the waves were cut off and sprayed in fine spindrift. With full steam on we felt our way out, we hoped to the open sea; meanwhile the chain cable and damaged anchor were slowly being hauled in. The ship's chances looked very ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... at his cigar in silence. The quiet drone of the engines came up from below, and the moonlight fell in a broad band of radiance on the foaming ribbon of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... the far woods are dim, and the rooks cry and call. Down in the valley the lamps, and the mist, and a star over all, There by the rick, where they thresh, is the drone at an end, Twilight it is, and I travel ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... fluctuating drone of the wheels below the car, re-echoed by the flying track, is more perceptible now, but it is not unpleasantly loud, merely a ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... over the emotions it must have; for the Negroes are said to be gradually maddened by it; and white people have told me that its very monotony, if listened to long, is strangely exciting, like the monotony of a bagpipe drone, or of a drum. What more went on at the dance we could not see; and if we had tried, we should probably not have been allowed to see. The Negro is chary of admitting white men to his amusements; and no wonder. If a London ballroom were suddenly invaded by Phoebus, Ares, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... that this is an incomplete account of Mr. Kipling's genius as a poet. He does something more in his verse, it may be urged, than drone on the harmonium of Imperialism, and transmute the language of the Ratcliff Road into polite literature. That is quite true. He owes his fame partly also to the brilliance with which he talked adventure and talked "shop" to a generation that was exceptionally greedy ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... watched the other as he filled and emptied his glass again. "It is the good wine," said Flores. The candle-light cast a huge, distorted shadow of the Mexican's head and shoulders on the farther wall. The faint drone of the hot wind came to them from the plains above. The candle-flame fluttered. Flores reached down for the jug and set it on the table. "All night we shall drink of the good wine, for no ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... he was a musician. Only artists go in for such lovely hair. But he undressed in dignified silence, not casting so much as another glance in my direction, while on my part I also forgot his presence when, looking through the port-hole, I realized that the train had begun to move. Soon the drone of the propelling engines began to make itself heard. Then the train began to dip down and the steel sides of the entrance became too high for me to see over. My friend of the silver hair had already turned off the light, ...
— The Undersea Tube • L. Taylor Hansen
... a chosen party of friends to the little cottage which was to be their future home. The pipers stood at the threshold of Jack Dwyer, and his daughter departed from under the "roof-tree" to the tune of "Joy be with you"; and then the lilters, heading the body-guard of the bride, plied drone and chanter right merrily until she had entered her new home, thanked her old friends (who did all the established civilities, and cracked all the usual jokes attendant on the occasion); and Andy bolted the door of ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... white frame building, oblong in shape, had four windows with green outer blinds on each of its two sides, and a door at the end nearer the road. As Webb traversed the open space, where, on Sundays, horses were hitched to the trees and saplings, a drone as of countless bees fell on his ears. To a native this needed no explanation. During five of the week-days the building was used as a schoolhouse. The sound was made by the students studying aloud, and John's niece, Dolly Drake, had sole ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... have found him quite a romantic person. In the actuality she felt as frigid as if his marble forehead was chilling her, and what she remembered most acutely was his fishlike gasping. Then, too, the contradictoriness of his social attitude, his desire to make her a rich drone, his shame at his mother, his reclusive shyness—all the weaknesses of the man—came to obscure her sense of his literary idealism, if not, indeed, to reveal it as a mere coquetry with fine ideas and coarse clothes. And then for a moment the humour of being Mrs. Maper's daughter-in-law appealed ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... vainly sought To win her for herself alone; What potent spell could Love have wrought To draw her to a tactless drone? ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... emmet, provident Of future; in small room large heart enclosed; Pattern of just equality perhaps Hereafter, joined in her popular tribes Of commonalty: Swarming next appeared The female bee, that feeds her husband drone Deliciously, and builds her waxen cells With honey stored: The rest are numberless, And thou their natures knowest, and gavest them names, Needless to thee repeated; nor unknown The serpent, subtlest beast of all the field, Of huge extent sometimes, with brazen ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... over the picture, the multiform life of earth swiftly re-awakens; birds and butterflies hover in the air, the monkeys chatter merrily, and leap from bough to bough. The sounds which then arise—song and hum and murmur, the roll of the river, the drone of insects, the cries of the wild beasts—all seem to blend in one grand vesper harmony—one choral hymn of thanksgiving to the Lord of life. These are generally hushed as the night advances; and then swarms of fire-flies and glow-worms light their tiny ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... to be laid low by the smallest beast of them all. Well, he had the remedy for this one, too. Rolling up his sleeve with shaking fingers, he pressed the mouth of the medikit to his bare arm. It clicked and began to drone an angry whine. That meant something, he knew, but he just couldn't remember what. Holding it up he saw that one of the hypodermics was projecting halfway from its socket. Of course. It was empty of whatever antibiotic the analyzer had called ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... if she has changed her mind at the last minute? But no. The organist has sailed into his set piece; the choir advances; follows the bride looking so lonely that I long to comfort her and remind her of my egg stand; and, last of all, the pretty bridesmaids. The clergyman begins his drone. ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... jollity; and, what is still more delightful, a year of equality: the glutton now eats the delicacies for which he longed when he could not purchase them, and the drunkard has the pleasure of wine, without the cost: the drone lives awhile without work, and the shopkeeper, in the flow of money, raises his price: the mechanick, that trembled at the presence of sir Joseph, now bids him come again for an answer: and the poacher, whose gun has been seized, now finds an opportunity to reclaim it. Even the honest man ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... wandered down into the land of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least expected, may take a thought to revisit the sunlit upper world. That will be a strange moment for the cabmen on the stance beside St. Giles's, when they hear the drone of his pipes reascending from the bowels of the earth below their ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... make me simply ill—I could never describe to you," said Miriam, with her face aglow, "what it is to me to hear some silly man drone away with an undistributed ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... applies to Bijah, but his pocket was generally full of proxies instead of rye, and the Honorable Heth was frequently one of the four and twenty blackbirds. In short, Bijah was the working bee, and the Honorable Heth the ornamental drone. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... gold. A lark far up in the heavens sang its few clear notes as it hastened homeward. Far away on the mountain-side the cattle lay placidly, and a mare whinnied to her colt. The air was soft and warm and drowsy with the scent of many flowers, the sounds of nestling birds, the drone of an insect here and there, the ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... wilderness—that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions. This alone, I was convinced, had driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations. And, don't you see, the terror of the position was not in being knocked on the head—though I had a very lively sense of that danger, too—but in this, ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... sunshine the days of my youth went past. I still maintained my character as a drone and a dreamer. I used my time tramping the moorland with a gun, whipping the foamy pools of the burn for trout, or reading voraciously in the library. Mostly I read books of travel, and especially did I relish the ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... engines were checked, turning at half speed for a number of revolutions, then ceasing as a bell rang. The only sound was the soughing gurgle of the water as it lapped along the steel plates, and the distant drone ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... Kidd, Douglas, and other witless men amongst them, to hearken to any proposals of peace. Among others that Douglas, sitting on his horse, and preaching to the confused multitude, told them that they would come to terms with them, and like a drone was always droning on these terms with them: 'they would give us a half Christ, but we will have a whole Christ,' and such like impertinent speeches as these, good enough to feed those that are served with wind and not ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... here of an afternoon with the sun pointing fingers through the high leaded windows, Whewel of Coggershall took you under his spell, the spell of old ghosts of long forgotten afternoons, spacious afternoons filled with the cawing of rooks and the drone of bees. English afternoons of the good old time when the dust of the post chaise was the only mark of hurry across miles of meadow land and cowslip weather. And then as you sat held by the sound of the slow-slipping seconds, maybe, from some door leading to the servants' quarters ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... between the bees of the Luneburg heath and those of this country!"..."Removing an old queen and substituting a young one of the current year is here an infallible mode of keeping the strongest stock from swarming and preventing drone-breeding; whilst the same means if adopted in Hanover would certainly be of no avail." I procured a hive full of dead bees from Jamaica, where they have long been naturalised, and, on carefully comparing them under the microscope with my own bees, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... heard that Daddy was a harvestman. But she didn't know that some people called him by that name merely because he was seen in Pleasant Valley about the time Farmer Green harvested his crops. As for working in the fields, Daddy Longlegs knew no more about that than did that fat drone, Buster Bumblebee. And Farmer Green would have laughed heartily at the idea of either of them ...
— The Tale of Daddy Longlegs - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... shovels,—anything that comes to hand is used without fear or favour; men, women, children struggle together in inextricable confusion amidst the debris of wrecked furniture, broken glass, and battered pewter; high above the din drone the nasal tones of the piper; while amidst the infernal clatter "the praist" vainly endeavours to re-establish order and make himself heard. Theatrical Fun Dinner (1841) represents the close of the banquet. Hamlet is already too far gone to know what he is doing; Othello belabours ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... my life-work is as yet barely begun. When my long rest overtakes me, I must not be found idly sitting with folded hands. Since I was thirteen years old I have never once rested; and now I am afraid I never shall. I would rather die working than live a drone." ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... intervals, when the drift of air opposing the planes developed irregularities in its velocity. There succeeded, in contrast, the sublimest peace; even the roaring of the propeller dwindled to a sustained drone; the biplane seemed to float without an effort upon a vast, still sea, flawed ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... that hateful prison, for the bolts clanged behind her, down stairs and into the courtyard, where the sun's light almost blinded her and the fresh air struck her hot brow like ice. Then there were more voices, and people moving to and fro and the drone of a priest praying and a touch upon her hand from which she shrank. And oh! she wished that dream were done, for it was long, long. It wearied her, and grasped her heart with a cold ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... whisking myself. They made up a lair for me with abundant greatcoats in the corner of the room, and my eyes gradually closed in sleep, catching, till they were finally sealed up, every now and then, twinklings of bare legs and well-turned ankles, mingled with the clatter of heavy brogues, and the drone of a bagpipe that had now superseded the squeak of the fife, and ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... and the frenzy grows apace with the hour, till honor and justice, truth and manliness, are lost together in the furious chaos of human elements. The tortured airs of heaven howl out curses in a horrid unison, this fair free soil of ours, dishonored and befouled, moans beneath our feet in a dismal drone of hopeless woe; there is no rock or cavern or ghostly den of our mighty land but hisses back the echo of some hideous curse, and hell itself is upon earth, split ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... there came a swift change in the even drone of their engine,—a jarring, discordant note, slight but unmistakable, and a ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... world completely, expecting to have the unknown rocketeer fire at them. Then a fire bomb had been dropped as a further means of getting the asteroid to fire. But no rockets had been fired from the asteroid, so the pilot in control of the drone had sent it at low speed, ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... darkened. Those who were not handsome, or who had not long beards, carried THEIR tapers anyhow, and abandoned themselves to spiritual contemplation. Meanwhile, the chaunting was very monotonous and dreary. The procession passed on, slowly, into the chapel, and the drone of voices went on, and came on, with it, until the Pope himself appeared, walking under a white satin canopy, and bearing the covered Sacrament in both hands; cardinals and canons clustered round him, making a brilliant show. The soldiers of the guard knelt down as ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... before he drops asleep. When he comes to church the same phenomenon occurs. He cannot resist the soporific tendencies of the furnaces. By the time Mr. Work gets fairly into secondly, Farmer Faragon is sound asleep. So he does not even listen to the preaching. Is he then a drone? Suppose you make a calculation how many mouths he feeds indirectly by the products of his farm. I cannot even guess. But I know nothing ever goes from it that is not good. The child is happy that drinks his milk, the butcher fortunate who buys his beef, the housewife well off who has his ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... It is all admirable, from that grand sentence, Nec vero terroe ferre omnes omnia possunt—that is to say, that not every soil is suited to every tree, Senor Don Jose—to the exhaustive treatise on bees, in which the poet describes the habits of those wise little animals, defining the drone in these words: ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... times to their own Loss; so is it often too apt to push on more elevated Spirits to renew the Encounter for atchieving new Conquests, by hazarding too rashly all their former Glory. Accordingly, every Body now began to make his utmost Efforts; and look'd upon himself as a Drone, if he was not employ'd in doing something or other towards pushing forward the Siege of Barcelona it self, and raising proper Batteries for that Purpose. But, after all, it must in Justice be acknowledg'd, that notwithstanding ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... twice the time he would if he had proceeded more leisurely. In a word, everything is done with a bounce, and a thump, and an air, and a flourish, and sharp and eager motions, and perpetual volubility of tongue. His image is that of a blind beetle in the twilight, which, with incessant hum and drone and buzz, flies blundering into the face of every one it chances ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... sabbath-drawler of old saws, Distill'd from some worm-canker'd homily; But spurr'd at heart with fiercest energy To embattail and to wall about thy cause With iron-worded proof, hating to hark The humming of the drowsy pulpit-drone Half God's good Sabbath, while the worn-out clerk Brow-beats ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... and barren class-rooms, in time waxed wearisome to Sylvanus. He grew to loathe the drone of the classes, the snuffy prelections of professors long settled on the lees of their intellects, who still moused about among the dusty speculations which had done duty for thought when their lectures were new, thirty years ago. "A ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... nothing else' (post, April 7, 1778, and Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 15, 1773). Not six months before his death he asked Dr. Burney to teach him the scale of music (ante, p. 263, note 4). That 'he appeared fond of the bagpipe, and used often to stand for some time with his ear close to the great drone' (Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 15), does not tell for much either way. In his Hebrides (Works, ix. 55), he shews his pleasure in singing. 'After supper,' he writes, 'the ladies sung Erse songs, to which I listened, as an English audience to an Italian opera, delighted with the sound of words ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... thick, his delivery spiritless, and his candences ridiculous. His soul was so overlaid with brawn and dignity that, though it heaved, panted, and struggled, it could never once get vent. Speaking through his apoplectic organs, I could not understand myself: it was a mumbling hubbub, the drone of a bagpipe, and the tantalizing strum strum of a hurdy-gurdy! Never was hearer more impatient to have it begin; never was hearer better pleased to have it over! Every sentence did but increase the fever of my mind. Enoch himself ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... at night, but this London moved with the decorum and caution of an undertaker. There was a silence, and yet there was no silence. There was a low drone, perhaps a humming contributed inevitably by closely-gathered thousands, and yet on second thoughts it was to me silence. I had perched my ears for the note of London, the sound made simply by the existence of five million people in one place. I had imagined something deep, vastly deep, ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... pushed back, with much circumspection and caution, the sliding panel, listened for a moment to the low murmur of their lordships' voices, waited until each of his men had gone stealthily behind the tapestry, listened again and still heard the drone of speech, he returned as he came, and accompanied by a guard of two score, escorted the Empress to the broad public stairway that led up one flight to the door of the Wahlzimmer. The two sentinels ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... Georgius Secundus was then alive— 10 Snuffy old drone from the German hive. That was the year when Lisbon town Saw the earth open and gulp her down, And Braddock's army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. 15 It was on the terrible Earthquake day That the Deacon finished the ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... will give copies of some memoranda which I have. To give all would take more room than I can spare. In looking these memoranda over the greatest gratification I feel comes from the evident fact that I was not a drone, but tried to do my duty. And fifty years further along in our nation's history it may be a satisfaction to my then living relatives ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith
... to our daily uses is loved and petted; and in decorating our rooms we educate ourselves in design. The place in church which has been our own for years,—is not that dear to us, and the voice that has told us of God's tidings—even though the drone become more evident as it waxes in years, and though it grows feeble and indolent? And the faces of those who have lived around us, do we not love them too, the servants who have worked for us, and the children who have first toddled beneath our eyes and prattled in our ears, and now run their ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... and Richmond were on a train, speeding away from the roar, the clang, the turmoil, the smoke, the atmospheric streams of stench, the trouble of the city. They saw a funeral procession, and Richmond remarked: "They have killed a drone and are dragging him out of the hive, and as they have set out so early they must be going to pay him the compliment of a long haul." They passed stations where men who had spent a quiet night at home paced up and down impatiently waiting for a train to whirl them back to their daily strife. "They ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... once more upon the ground, panting like a fish; and I saw rising in his face the same dusky flush that had mantled on my father's. 'I feel ill,' he gasped, 'horribly ill; the swamp turns around me; the drone of these carrion flies confounds me. Have you ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... to dispirit the debtor; or, where his resources are but partial, the want of power in the Government to compromise and release the demand instigates to fraud as the only resource for securing a support to his family. He thus sinks into a state of apathy, and becomes a useless drone in society or a vicious member of it, if not a feeling witness of the rigor and inhumanity of his country. All experience proves that oppressive debt is the bane of enterprise, and it should ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... gaping holes in the walls through which could be caught glimpses of sentries going backwards and forwards. Sometimes a grey battalion swung by; sometimes a German officer peered in curiously, with a sneer on his lips. The drone of aircraft came from above, through the holes where the rafters showed black against the sky. Ever the guns boomed savagely ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... could spare; we could watch without weeping A Tutor's extinction, a Dean's disappearance. And Professors who drone while their pupils are sleeping, Though they went at a loss, we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... like the drone-fly (Eristalis tenax), force the air through the tiny air-passages in their sides, and as these passages are closed by little plates, the plates vibrate to and fro and make sound-waves. Again, what are those curious sounds you ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... himself, he entered the inn, and, guided by the drone of voices, sauntered into the bar. At sight of Mr. Caryll leaning there, his little eyes beamed an instant, as do the eyes of one who espies a friend, or—apter figure—the eyes of the hunter when ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... the way of taking them thus: Set Pursenets on their Holes, and put in a Ferret close muzzled, and she will bolt them out (being a natural Enemy to them) into the Nets: Or blow on the suddain the Drone of a Bag-Pipe into the Burrows, and they will boult out: Or for want of either of these two, take powder of Orpine and Brimstone and boult them out with the Smother: But pray use this last seldom, unless you would destroy ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... of man, where reigns a mountain which acknowledges supremacy to Mount Everest alone. A region of completest solitude, where the solemn silence is unbroken by the twitter of a single bird or the drone of the smallest insect, and is disturbed only by the occasional thunder of an avalanche or the grinding crunch of the glacier as a reminder of the titanic forces which are ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... of mournful drone, A part from aught to hear, to see, I dreamt not that from shires unknown In gloom, alone, By Halworthy, A man was drawing ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... curious drone of the strange car as it swooped down upon us, coming to a sudden halt a yard distant, with really ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... have slept out your Yesterday's Debauch? Are you not asham'd, you sleepy Sot, to lye a-bed till this time of Day? Good Servants rise as soon as it is Day, and take Care to get every Thing in order before their Master rises. How loth this Drone is to leave his warm Nest! he is a whole Hour a scratching, ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... chamber, and in the atmosphere of our room where night still lingers, they trace vague white rays. Soon, when the sun shall have risen, these rays will lengthen and become beautifully golden. The cocks and the cicalas make themselves heard, and now Madame Prune will begin her mystic drone. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... exercise that capacity. A hint was enough for the boy. Straightway he had a vivid picture before his mind, and as he listened to the men at the dinner-table, their rough clipped words set him down in the midst of their battlefields, he heard the drone of bullets, he quivered expecting the shock of a charge. But of all the Crimean nights this had been fraught with the ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... stocking feet ceased with the drone of the drowsy voice; a bit of sunlight filtering first through the tulip-trees, then through the little low kitchen window, let it be seen that Mr. Pawket had lapsed into slumber. His wife looked at him with an expressionless face. Wringing her hands out of the dish-water, she carried ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... witty invectives against usury. They say that it is a pity, the devil should have God's part, which is the tithe. That the usurer is the greatest Sabbath-breaker, because his plough goeth every Sunday. That the usurer is the drone, that Virgil ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... room to grumble! Hadst thou taen aff some drowsy bummle, [drone] Wha can do nought but fyke an' fumble, [fuss] 'Twad been nae plea; [grievance] But he was gleg as ony wumble, [lively, auger] That's owre ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... bees, let us briefly review the life of the Honey bee. The queen bee having wintered over with many workers, lays her eggs in the spring, first in the worker, and, at a later period, in the drone-cells. Early in the summer the workers construct the large, flask-shaped queen-cells, which are placed on the edge of the comb, and in these the queen larvae are fed with rich and choice food. The ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... it in mind. It is a complete perplexity to me, and yet certainly insects can rudely somehow judge of distance. There are special difficulties on account of the gradation in size between the worker-scells and the larger drone-cells. I am trying to test the case practically by getting combs of different species, and of our own bee from different climates. I have lately had some from the W. Indies of our common bee, but the cells SEEM certainly to be larger; but they have not yet been ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... open air under a sky, with fresh winds blowing about one. He tried to picture on that dull strip of metal overhead a stretch of green grass, a tree, even the blue sky and floating white clouds. But the patch remained stubbornly gray, the murmur of Wonstead went on and on, a drone in his aching ears, the throb of the ship's life beat through ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... me there Collonel; are Pleasure and Business inconsistent, must ev'ry Citizen be a Drone, that crawls among Furr Gowns, or a Cuckold that's preferr'd by the Common-Hall; pray tell me, what difference is there between a Merchant of a good Education, and a Gentleman of Two Thousand Pounds a Year, only one ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... something about pressing business. But in his sudden surprise he had not time to think of assuming either the nasal drone or the scriptural words peculiar to these black-coated gentry. Struck by his tone, the sergeant sprang forward ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... pockets and whistling as though he had just come from a short walk. And the women sitting at their doorsteps as he passed: "There's that scoundrel Macquart! He has hidden his bales and his gun in some hollow of the Viorne." The truth was, Macquart had no means, and yet ate and drank like a happy drone during his short sojourns in the town. He drank copiously and with fierce obstinacy. Seating himself alone at a table in some tavern, he would linger there evening after evening, with his eyes stupidly fixed on his glass, neither seeing nor hearing anything around him. When the ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... hot, and the silence of high noon lay close and thick between the steep slopes of the canyons like an invisible, muffling fluid. At intervals the drone of an insect bored the air and trailed slowly to silence again. Everywhere were pungent, aromatic smells. The vast, moveless heat seemed to distil countless odors from the brush—odors of warm sap, of pine needles, and of tar-weed, and above all the medicinal ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... from tears as she thought how different was this bridal tour from what she had anticipated. She had fully expected to pass by daylight through the Empire State, and she had thought with how much delight her eye would rest upon the grassy meadows, the fertile plains, the winding Mohawk, the drone-like boats on the canal, the beautiful Cayuga, and the silvery water so famed in song; but, in contrast to all this, she was shut up in a dingy car, whose one dim lamp sent forth a sickly ray and sicklier smell, while without ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... most unfortunate that we must lack His eloquence to-day. The people, who Always love high-sounding words more than Wise thoughts, prefer the music of his voice To good old Wilson's drone. ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... resting against Luigi's; weariness had overcome him, and for the past five minutes he had been peacefully sleeping. The old ladies had dropped their voices to a lulling drone, to help him to steal the rest his brother wouldn't take him up-stairs to get. Luigi listened a moment to Angelo's regular breathing, then said ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... mail. "Florence was a devil—Florence was divine. They raised geniuses and devils and martyrs: the most cloud-topping geniuses, the worst devils, the most saintly martyrs. But better than being a drone in a Florence pension is all this"—with a wave of his hand to the garden and the stars—"which I owe to Mary and the little speck on her lungs which brought us here after—after we had found that we had not ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... queen never uses her sting except when in battle with another queen bee; but the other bees take care of her, even if they must die for her sake. There are different kinds of bees in the hive. Drone bees cannot sting; and they will not work—they are lazy fellows. In the fall they are all killed, so that during the long winter months they cannot eat the honey which ...
— A Hive of Busy Bees • Effie M. Williams
... and closed, as it were, the door of his fancy against her with a bang. He set a lamp on a table at the head of his bed and read his political economy until dawn. It was, in fact, too hot for any nervous person to sleep. Now and then his thoughts wandered, the incessant drone of the night insects outside seemed to distract his attention from his book like some persistent clamor of nature recalling him to his leading-strings in which she had held him from the first. But resolutely he turned again to his book. At dawn he fell asleep, and woke an hour ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... at the full, and a few gently sailing scraps of cloud, which crossed it, made it seem to be coming towards them. The plains beneath were veiled in haze; detached sounds mounted from them: the prolonged barking of a dog, the drone of an approaching train. Round about them, the air was heavy with the scent of the sun-warmed pines. Maurice had taken her hand and sat holding it: it was the one thing that existed for him. All else was vague and unreal: only their two hearts beat in all the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... based upon song-craft nor state-craft, upon the foot-races he has run nor the wrestlers he has thrown. His superiority is based upon the fact that he doesn't have to work, and that others are compelled to work for him. And so the Korean drone flaunts his clean white clothes, for the same reason that the Chinese flaunts his monstrous finger-nails, and the white man and woman flaunt the spick-and-spanness of their ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... fluttered, Perched upon the place Vacant left, and duly uttered 'Love, Love, Love,' whene'er the bass 100 Asked the treble to atone For its somewhat sombre drone." ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... Would the motorist pay any attention to him, or would he flash past and leave him in the dust? From the rate at which the drone increased the car seemed to be travelling ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... literature had not prospered so much, nor displayed so broad a diffusion of intelligence and taste, as had been expected. Pope's Dunciad, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, and ironic satire on the state of literature under "Augustus" (George II, the "snuffy old drone from the German hive"), brilliantly express this indignation with the intellectual and literary shortcomings of ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... in his lengthy recital, came to her softly, and she could see from her perch the interested faces of the two others. It mingled drowsily with the dull drone of bees in the ti-tree behind her, and presently Norah, to her disgust, found that she was growing ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... until he had rolled a cigarette, and then instead of going to sleep he began talking to Piegan, asking what seemed to me a lot of rather trifling questions. I was nearly worn out, and their conversation was nowise interesting to me, so listening to the monotonous drone of their voices and the steady beat of falling rain, ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... in perfect harmony with yellow marigolds and calceolaria. The house is divided from the road by palings richly covered by Virginia creepers, and as they approach Philip pauses to lean on the wicket gate and view the peaceful homestead silently. The drone of bees and busy presence of insect toil is soothing and melodious. He takes Eleanor's hand and kisses it in the full glare of the mid-day sun under the heavily laden fruit trees. Then they pass by the brilliant flower-beds to the rustic porch, through which is visible the Grebbys' twelve ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... instruct the Captain," said Manuel promptly, "to head at once for Villefranche. There you, Senor, will leave the yacht, and I will go with it to Monte Carlo. I wish to be as soon as possible in the casino where the drone of the croupier and the clink of outflowing louis ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... thousand" would, I believe, be frightful. In America, the "boys" get up so early, that it is said they frequently "catch the birds by their tails as they are going to roost;" and it is no doubt owing to this that they are so 'cute. Talk about "catching a weasel asleep," let me see any of my metropolitan drone friends who can ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... went out, for the fire-flies fled in every direction; but in the darkness Twinkle thought she could still hear the drone of the big bass fiddle and the flute-like ...
— Twinkle and Chubbins - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland • L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
... fitful chimney-roar, The drone of Thorncombe trees, The Froom in flood upon the moor, The ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... husband? You would not have your wife a drone in these days, when the world all round us ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... her thoughts the old man's voice reached her in a faint, indistinguishable drone. She had not the slightest interest in what he wished to say to Lady Clifford, nor in the effect it would have upon the latter. All at once she heard the Frenchwoman shriek ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... been some touch of the old bandit railway blood that bade him buy, for a song, Holt Hangars, whose forty-acre lawn, as every one knows, sweeps down in velvet to the quadruple tracks of the Great Buchonian Railway. Their trains flew by almost continuously, with a bee-like drone in the day and a flutter of strong wings at night. The son of Merton Sargent had good right to be interested in them. He owned controlling interests in several thousand miles of track,—not permanent way,—built on ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... from all parts flock in. Cousins, uncles and aunts, of more or less distant grade, hang on to the recently-established household, if it be not extremely poor. Even when a European marries a native woman, she is certain to introduce some vagabond relation—a drone to hive with the bees—a condition quite inevitable, unless the husband be a ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... and bits of carved ivory, not to speak of the men who created those things, and who were of no practical use to the community in which they lived. And the workmen in the factories listened to the drone of their engines until they too had lost all taste for the melody of the flute or fiddle of their peasant ancestry. The arts became the step-children of the new industrial era. Art and Life became entirely separated. Whatever paintings had been left, were dying ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... attempted to escape to Newfoundland in the pinnace they would arrive at the gallows; the sick should not starve; every man able must work, and every man who did not gather as much in a day as he did should be put out of the fort as a drone. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... did not last. In a few minutes the two young Burghers were not the only ones whom the spell had subdued—the wizard was netted too. And then, as he stood, his hands still fluttering, they heard him drone a string of words, a dull chant, level like an incantation, inevitably apt to the hour ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... these delightful little beings. The mosquitos would blow a shrill blast on their trumpets, the orchestra would strike up, and then the festivities would begin in earnest. How the bumblebees would drone, how the wasps would buzz, and how the mosquitos would blare! It was a delightful harmony of weird sounds. The strange little dancers floated hither and thither over my master's baby face, as light as thistledowns, and as graceful as the slender ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... startled, and perceived above him an oeil de boeuf through which this song had come, and beyond, the upper courses of cable, the blue haze, and the pendant fabric of the lights of the public ways. He heard the song break into a tumult of voices and cease. He perceived quite clearly the drone and tumult of the moving platforms and a murmur of many people. He had a vague persuasion that he could not account for, a sort of instinctive feeling that outside in the ways a huge crowd must be watching this place in which their ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... harsh teasing screams now and then to toll a clear, musical passing bell for these, and the nuthatches are goblin gabriels blowing eerie trumps of resurrection to which the spirits of the bee people drone a second as they wing their way onward. The great white town of the white-faced hornets is conspicuous on the blueberry bush down in the far corner and within it are the husks of a few of its once roaringly busy inhabitants. But it is very quiet ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... ta right, Mistress Partan, and tat you'll pe seeing," said Duncan, who, hearing her first cry, had stopped his drone, and ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... comrades watched that night in St. Peter's church. Oppressed with weariness of body, and awe of mind, they heard the monks drone out their chants through the misty gloom; they confessed the sins—and they were many—of their past wild lives. They had to summon up within themselves courage and strength henceforth to live, not for themselves, but for the fatherland which they hoped to ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... hurt, and Casey would laugh at him. Aye, Casey would have laughed! .... They are men. There are thousands of them. The U. P. R. goes on. It can't be stopped. It has the momentum of a great nation pushing it on from behind.... And I, who have lost all I cared for, and you, who are a drone among the bees, and Ruby and Stanton with their kind, poor creatures sucked into the vortex; yes, and that mob of leeches, why we all are so stung by that nameless spirit that we are stirred beyond ourselves and dare both height and depth ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... they're caught pretty quickly. But sometimes they evade capture. And they can end up by exerting serious influence in cultural patterns. Some planets have been set back, and even destroyed as a result of drone activity. Although their motives are different, drones're just as bad and just as dangerous as ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... honour lay in me, From me by strong assault it is bereft. My honey lost, and I, a drone-like bee, Have no perfection of my summer left, But robb'd and ransack'd by injurious theft: In thy weak hive a wandering wasp hath crept, And suck'd the honey which thy chaste ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, ten shillings and sixpence"—the words came to him in a meaningless drone—"to the Fresh Air Fund, ten shillings and sixpence; to the King Edward Hospital Fund, ten shillings and sixpence"—was all the money going in charities?—"to my nephew Cecil Linley, who has taken ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
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