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More "Fiddle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... loved, and he would pass his fingers among the broad strings, and ever and anon he would produce from one of them a low, melancholy, almost unearthly sound. And then he would pause, never daring to produce two such notes in succession,—one close upon the other. And these last sad moans of the old fiddle were now known through the household. They were the ghosts of the melody of days long past. He imagined that his visits to the box were unsuspected,—that none knew of the folly of his old fingers which could not keep themselves from touching the wires; but the voice of ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... at her; even Johnny Whitelamb looked, with a face as long as a fiddle. The comment was quiet, but the note of scorn in it could not be mistaken. Molly in revolt! Molly, of all persons! Molly sat trembling. She knew that among them all Johnny was her one ally—and a hopelessly distressed and ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the gypsies now, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. The authorities have sent them away. But we've Jews that play the cymbals and the fiddle in the village, so one might send ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a "serious" interview with a woman if she is putting on new gloves! She is perfectly free to seem occupied or not, as suits her convenience; and she can, by wrestling with the gloves, interrupt him without speech, distract his attention, fiddle his thoughts, give him a sense of imbecile futility, and all the time offer him no cause for resentment against her. He himself seems in the wrong; she is ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... didn't do the fair thing. He got you to give the flag through him instead of through me, by a mean trick. He gets the credit of getting the flag; now let him have the honor of accepting it. I won't play second fiddle to such a fellow as he is, and that's all ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... that everything has this shot-silk quality, and is all the finer for that. When people talk of a horse as an ugly animal I think of its beautiful moments, but when I hear a flow of indiscriminate praise of its beauty I think of such an aspect as one gets for example from a dog-cart, the fiddle-shaped back, and that distressing blade of the neck, the narrow clumsy place between the ears, and the ugly glimpse of cheek. There is, indeed, no beauty whatever save that transitory thing that comes and comes again; all ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... when as the camp-fire cast a ruddy, genial flame, He'd bring his tuneful fiddle out and play upon the same; No diabolic engine this—no instrument of sin— No relative at all to that lewd toy, the violin! But a godly hoosier fiddle—a quaint archaic thing Full of all the proper melodies our grandmas used to sing; With "Bonnie Doon," ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... and Tommy stared over the rim of his mug with round eyes, full of interest. "Mr. Bhaer's got an old fiddle, and he'll let you play on ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... smooths down his hair. He enters: in the hall a crowd, No more the music thunders loud, Some a mazurka occupies, Crushing and a confusing noise; Spurs of the Cavalier Guard clash, The feet of graceful ladies fly, And following them ye might espy Full many a glance like lightning flash, And by the fiddle's rushing sound The voice ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... home. My mercantile career had ended, and forthwith I took to the range as a preacher's son takes to vice. By the time I was twenty there was no better cow-hand in the entire country. I could, besides, speak Spanish and play the fiddle, and thought nothing of riding thirty miles to a dance. The vagabond temperament of the ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... a sign. The fiddler tucked up the sleeve of his coat, squeezed tightly the finger board, rested his chin on the tailpiece, and sent his bow over the fiddle like a race horse. At this signal, the bagpipers, who were standing close by, blew into their sacks and filled their cheeks with breath, making a quick motion with their arms as though flapping their wings; you might have thought that the pair would fly off on the breeze, ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... been in the world for all time, the positive right and wrong, which are facts, not ideas. I believe that there is good and evil, that the one is at war with the other always; and that good can do no evil, evil no good. I've got beyond all the dogma and fiddle-faddle of the intellect with which the church has overlaid the spirit, and all the ceremonial so useful and necessary for individual souls in early stages of development. I used to think if I could find a religion with no blood in it, I would embrace it. Now I feel sure that it does ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... tormented him a lot," admitted her husband. "He's a great hand at the fiddle and likes company. He goes to the harbour a good deal. But they say he takes sulky spells when he hasn't a word to throw to a dog. 'Twouldn't be any wonder, living with the Gordons. They're all as ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... will be no end until the venerable traditional nonsense about those interesting emotions shares the fate that should overtake all the cobwebs of ignorance thickly clogging the windows and walls of the human mind. Of all the fiddle-faddle concerning passion probably none is more shudderingly admired than the notion that one possessed of an overwhelming desire for another longs to destroy that other. It is true there is a form of murderous mania that ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... venture a wrestle with the boatswain, who was very appropriately distinguished by the cognomen of Jemmy Ducks. Jemmy was a sensible, merry fellow, and a good seaman: you could not affront him by any jokes on his figure, for he would joke with you. He was indeed the fiddle of the ship's company, and he always played the fiddle to them when they danced, on which instrument he was no mean performer; and, moreover, accompanied his voice with his instrument when he sang to them after they were tired of dancing. ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... curtain in front of the stage and the orchestra was located in the rear of the stage. The orchestra would attract attention anywhere. The music was a cross between the noise made by a boiler shop during working hours and a horse fiddle at a ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... buried his face in his hands. "That was ignorance, an' I'm payin' for it by havin' you turn away an' snap my future like a fiddle string! Oh, how could my hand a-struck yoh ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... confituras. Instead, the houses inside now ring with boisterous revelry, with a perfume of mint and Monongahela; and although the guitar still tinkles, it is almost inaudible amid the louder strains of clarionet, fiddle, and ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... fine Rouen cloth is to be made; your Leominster superfine wool is mine arse to it; mere flock in comparison. Of their skins the best cordovan will be made, which shall be sold for Turkey and Montelimart, or for Spanish leather at least. Of the guts shall be made fiddle and harp strings that will sell as dear as if they came from Munican or Aquileia. What do you think on't, hah? If you please, sell me one of them, said Panurge, and I will be yours for ever. Look, here's ready cash. What's the price? ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... together with some others, were, for the most part, as a maul on the head of pride, and desire of vain glory; what, thought I, shall I be proud because I am a sounding brass? Is it so much to be a fiddle? Hath not the least creature that hath life, more of God in it than these? Besides, I knew it was love should never die, but these must cease and vanish; so I concluded, a little grace, a little love, a little of the true fear ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... up. The persons on the balcony hang over the railings. The figures on the floor go reeling off in a mixture of dancing and by-play as fantastic as the music. The pianist seems to get excited and to want to prove himself a Hans von Bulow of rapid execution. The fiddler weaves excitedly over his fiddle. The cornetist toots in a screech like a car-engine whistle. The movements of the dancers grow licentious and more and more rapid. They have begun the Cancan. Feet go up. Legs are exhibited in wild abandon. Hats fly off. There are occasional exhibitions of nature that would put Adam and ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... ax. Seizing the tool, he sprang erect, poised for an instant upon the edge of the boat which was already awash, and with the next flash of lightning, brought its blade down upon the wire cable stretched taut as a fiddle gut. The rebound of the ax nearly wrenched it from his grasp, the boat shifted as the cable seemed to stretch ever so slightly, and the Texan noted with satisfaction that the edge was no longer awash. Another ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... didn't want to make bombs or automatic bankrobbers; he just wanted to fiddle with the stack, see what it would do. He turned it over in his hands a couple of times, then shrugged, got up, went over to his closet, and put the thing away. There wasn't anything he could do with it until he'd bought ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the superintendence of his father, he had written a sonata, which, however, along with many other juvenile productions, he lately destroyed; and as he played about three times a week in the churches and at private musical parties, upon a fiddle nearly as large as himself, he soon began to make himself known among his townsmen. At this time he received much benefit from one Francesco Gnecco, who died in 1811, and whom ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... was receiving friends in his own house. The handsome doctor promenaded the deck arm-in-arm with ladies in course of rapid recovery from the first gastric consequences of travelling by sea. The excellent chief engineer, musical in his leisure moments to his fingers' ends, played the fiddle in his cabin, accompanied on the flute by that young Apollo of the Atlantic trade, the steward's mate. Only on the third morning of the voyage was the harmony on board the Aquila disturbed by a passing moment of discord—due to an unexpected addition ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... strong enough to work the land; but the father was old and frail and knew nothing about farming. He was a weaver by trade; had been a skilled workman on tapestries and upholstery materials. He had brought his fiddle with him, which wouldn't be of much use here, though he used to pick up money by ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... tall, handsome black fellow, with white teeth and bright eyes, and he could play the fiddle and pick the banjo, and knock the bones and cut the pigeon-wing, and, besides all that, he was the best hoe-hand, and could pick more cotton than any other negro on the plantation. He had amused himself by courting and flirting with all ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... when I was dining with the Mitfords, when he knew that his time had come, to turn to Mrs. Bourke, who was famous only as shining in his reflected light, and say: "Mrs. Bourke, won't you play us something, and I will just come in with my fiddle?" Rubinstein's playing I never liked. To me he seemed only the most violent of all the piano-bangers of the world; but he was literally worshipped by his admirers, and was grand to look at—as fine as Beethoven must ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... dear!" And had it come to this that their preacher had to sleep on the prairie! This was a family of hospitable Kentuckians, who were born to a love of music, and the old gentleman was a fiddler, and next to his Bible he loved his fiddle. Of course, we had a grand, good time, and were all filled with joy; and this was the beginning of the churches on the upper waters of the Kansas River. Twelve miles above St. George was Ashland, where we found ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... Meath (A curious corruption of Mentz. Old printers distorted foreign names in an extraordinary manner.) Mechall Mention ( dimension) Mew Middleton, quotation from his Family of Love Minikin ( fiddle) Mistris Moe Monthes mind Mooncalf More hayre than wit Morglay Mosch Mother Motion ( suggestion, proposal) Mouse Much (ironical) Mumchance Muscadine Muschatoes ( moustaches) Mushrumps ( mushrooms) Music ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... for fifteen minutes, and had a smoke out of a pipe that one of them left in reach; then the crossing was finished, and they stumped back and had a drink around and went to talking and singing again. Next they got out an old fiddle, and one played and another patted juba, and the rest turned themselves loose on a regular old- fashioned keel-boat break-down. They couldn't keep that up very long without getting winded, so by and by they settled around the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... name Irving Ramsey. Us play fiddle together lots of time. When de white boys dance dey allus wants me to go to play for dey party. One day I say to dat boy, 'I done knowed you last night.' He say, 'What you mean?' I say, 'You one dem Klu Klux.' He want to know how I know. I say, 'Member ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... revel of feasting and song and dancing. They received the new prisoner literally with open arms, and almost before she had wiped the tears from her eyes, at parting from her nurslings, she was capering gaily to the music of hautboy and fiddle, with the arm of a stalwart ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... diddle diddle, The cat and the fiddle, The cow jumped over the moon. The little dog laughed To see such a craft, And the dish ...
— Chenodia - The Classic Mother Goose • Jacob Bigelow
... saints! I think you are right, Clement Maldon," he muttered. "Beneath that black dress of yours you are a man like the rest of us, are you not? You have a heart, you have members, you have a brain to think with; you are a fiddle for God to play on, and however much your superstitions mask and alter it, out of those strings now and again will come some squeak of truth. Well, I am another fiddle, of a more honest sort, mayhap, ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... thought that I was a very queer boy displaced his image. I could not but be a very queer boy, such a lot of things happened to me. Suppose I joined the gipsies? My companion wished me to. She had brothers, horse-dealers, beautiful fiddlers. Suppose I learnt the fiddle? Suppose I learnt their language and went about with them and became king of the gipsies? My companion shook her head; she could not encourage this ambitious idea because she had never heard of a king of the gipsies or a queen either. 'We fool people,' ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... tenth good shield A fiddle, and 'neath it a bow; That's borne by Folker Spillemand; For drink he ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... to do but exist as cheerfully as might be until the weather improved. The wet had shrunk canvas and rope gear till the tent-guys were as taut as fiddle-strings; and as it did not seem to have occurred to any of the servants to attend to this, an immediate tour of the camp had to be undertaken, in "rubbers" and waterproofs, to slack off guys and inspect the drainage system, as we had no wish to have ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... feeling, and violent interruptions of the currents of mental life and action, are never favorable to reflection. If I wish to cheer a man who is bowed to the earth in grief for the loss of a companion, I will not break in upon his mourning with a lively tune upon a fiddle. If I wish to attract him to a religious life, I will not interrupt the flow of his innocently social hours by some terrible threat or warning. In truth, I know of nothing that calls for more care, or nicer discrimination, ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... comes the Times and eleven strikes (it does) already, and I have to go to Town, and I have no alternative but that this story of the Critic and Poet, 'the Bear and the Fiddle,' should 'begin but break off in the middle'; yet I doubt—nor will you henceforth, I know, say, 'I vex you, I am sure, by this lengthy writing.' Mind that spring is coming, for all this snow; and know me for yours ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... outsider that one is (if it all be true)—one whose heart, so hopelessly impervious to the written word, so helplessly callous to the spoken message, can be reached only by the organized vibrations of a trained larynx, a metal pipe, a reed, a fiddle-string—by invisible, impalpable, incomprehensible little air-waves in mathematical combination, that beat against a tiny drum at the back of one's ear. And these mathematical combinations and the laws that govern them have ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... the other end of the world. The place was empty of other customers. The Kaffir woman slumbered behind the flimsy planking of the bar, and "White Harry" sat on the counter scraping tunes out of a little fiddle. Thalassa remembered the tune he was playing—"Annie Laurie." Upon this scene there entered two young men, Englishmen. Thalassa discerned that at once by the cut of their jib. Besides, they ordered Bass beer. Who else but Englishmen would order Bass beer at five shillings a bottle ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... there than in the hum of men. There the stocks and stones are more impressible than those we sometimes stumble on in human society, and, moulded at our will, take what shape we choose to give them; the trees follow our footsteps, though our lips be mute, and we may have left at home our fiddle—more potent we in our actuality than the fabled Orpheus. Be hushed, ye streams, and listen unto Christopher! Be chained, ye clouds, and attentive unto North! And at our bidding silent the cataract on the cliff—the thunder on the sky. The sea beholds us on the shore—and his one huge frown ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... curves and super-ornamentation are out of fashion; whether they are really bad or not, time alone can tell. At present we are admiring plain silver and are perhaps exacting that it be too plain? The only safe measure of what is good, is to choose that which has best endured. The "King" and the "Fiddle" pattern for flat silver, have both been in use in houses of highest fashion ever since they were designed, so that they, among others, must have merit to have ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... and it is now at press again; which is very flattering to the unknown author. Another incognito proposes immediately to resume the second volume of Triermain, which is at present in the state of the Bear and Fiddle.[36] Adieu, dear Morritt. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... the then accountant, John Tipp. He neither pretended to high blood, nor in good truth cared one fig about the matter. He "thought an accountant the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest accountant in it." Yet John was not without his hobby. The fiddle relieved his vacant hours. He sang, certainly, with other notes than to the Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abominably. His fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle-street, which, without any ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... stories of some Negroes flinging themselves at the feet of an European playing on a fiddle, entreating him to desist, unless he had a mind to tire them to death; it being impossible for them to cease dancing, while he continued playing. Such is the irresistible passion for dancing ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... had quite an exciting time getting the piano up into the loft with the block and pulley. But the music sounds very well up there. The only trouble is old Andy Ferguson, the fencer—he's always been accustomed to fiddle for them, and he's very crushed because we've got out these men. Dad says he'd never have got them if he'd dreamed how ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... waiter, meditatively laying two fingers wide on his chin, 'as many people would call it a treat. But the little 'uns likes dressing up in their evening frocks, and the buns and lemonade is well enough for their time of life. There used to be a fiddle too, as well as the piano; but the class hev fallen off considerable of late. The management don't like it too well. But there's a notion 'twould be unfeelin' to stop it. She's been carrying it on all these years, and her ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... grouped so as to give occasion for a general frolic. Thus Daniel R. Tucker in 1858 sent a general invitation over the countryside in central Georgia to a sextuple wedding among his slaves, with dinner and dancing to follow.[2] On the whole, the fiddle, the banjo and the bones were ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... held in the adjoining regions of Smithfield, there is nothing going on but gossiping and gadding about. The late quiet streets of Little Britain are overrun with an irruption of strange figures and faces; every tavern is a scene of rout and revel. The fiddle and the song are heard from the taproom morning, noon, and night; and at each window may be seen some group of boon companions, with half-shut eyes, hats on one side, pipe in mouth and tankard in hand, fondling and prosing, and singing maudlin songs over ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... have been ashamed to have spent as much time at my looking-glass as if I'd been a girl. I could make myself as smart as any one when I was going to a dance, or to a party where I was likely to meet pretty girls; but I should have laughed myself to scorn if I'd stood fiddle-faddling at a glass, smirking at my own likeness, all ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... as we used to call it. The play party was quite respectable, and could be indulged in by church-members. In it the people taking part sang airs each with its own words, and moved about in step to the music. The absence of the fiddle and the "calling off" and the name of dancing took the curse off. They went through figures a lot like dances; swung partners by one hand or both; advanced and retreated, "balanced to partners" ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... particularly characteristic dances is the Gigue with its counterparts mentioned above. This is a rapid, animated dance in 6/8, 3/8, 12/8, 12/16 (sometimes 4/4) with marked rhythm; the term being derived from giga (German, geige)—an early name for fiddle—on account of the power of accent associated with the violin family. The Gigue is always the closing number of Bach's Suites, in order to give a final impression of irrepressible vitality and gaiety, and is treated with considerable ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... one. Willin' as could be to do what he was told, but forgettin' what it was, regular. Just naturally no good, like, except with the fiddle. I will say, that with that there instrument he was a Paderwooski—yes, mam! By the time our outfit got into them trenches the boys was just clean dippy about him. They kind of took turns dry-nursin' him and remindin' him of the things he'd got to do, and doin' them ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... passing worth, The manner how he sallied forth; His arms and equipage are shown; His horse's virtues, and his own. Th' adventure of the bear and fiddle Is sung, but breaks off in ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... An' plays the fiddle fit to tear the heart out of your body, and reads big books till God knows what hour in the mornin'. His father, he says he don't know what to do with him ... There's a big, bad devil of a Polack down to the works that wants him to join the anarchists ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... disabled by the gout, his principal occupation was his violin, and it was her delight to listen to him. She more than once observed to the vicar, "Such music is quite heavenly." "I am in despair," cried out the village fiddler, "I may now stick my fiddle in my thatched roof, for a greater performer is come to reside in the parish." The existing superstition of the country is that his spirit, playing on his favourite instrument, still haunts one wing of Brynbella. If he ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Jerry," says he, "wife may as well hang up her fiddle about me; can't make a whistle out of a pig's tail, man, I tell ye! She may fuss up the young'un as much as she's a mind to, but it'll be labor lost over an old chap like me. I feel more at home down here in the old place, and a plaguy sight more comfortable, than ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... a bit of fiddle-de-dee," he informed his delighted family. "Duncan Gallosh to be looking for bogles is pretty ridiculous—but oh, I can't ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... effort, human and mechanical, all over the great factory, was now strained almost to the breaking-point. How long can this agony last? How long can the roar and the rush and the throbbing pain continue until that nameless and unknown something snaps like an overstrained fiddle-string and brings relief? The remorseless clock informed us that there were two hours more of this torture before the signal to "clean up"—a signal, however, which is not given until the last girl has finished her allotted task. At half-past two it appeared hopeless even to dream of getting out ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... felt that the day was not suitably ended if, after tidying up the kitchen and practicing "The Harp That Once" and "Oft in the Stilly Night" on his fiddle, he did not go across the fields to Marietta Martin's and compare the moment's mood with her, either in the porch or at her fireside, according to the season. They lived, each alone, in a stretch of meadow land ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... Marit, mother's young one, father's fiddle, the hulder of the house, granddaughter to Ola Nordistuen of the Heidegards, four years old in the autumn, two days ...
— A Happy Boy • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... in silence, and then rushed en masse upon the intruder, the landlord bringing up the rear, and sounding a charge upon his fiddle. But, as they drew nigh, the black cloak began to assume a familiar look; the hat, also, was an old acquaintance; and, these being removed, from beneath them shone forth the reverend face and form ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... over, we eat pudding, baked beans, mince, apple, and pumpkin pie, and top off with pop-corn, apples, and cider. After supper the girls clear away the dishes; then we push the table into one corner of the kitchen, Julius Caesar mounts it with his fiddle, and we dance jigs and quicksteps. The girl who first found a red ear while husking, and was kissed before she could throw it into the basket, is ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 20, 1773. Boswell writing of this Tour said:—'I also may be allowed to claim some merit in leading the conversation; I do not mean leading, as in an orchestra, by playing the first fiddle; but leading as one does in examining a witness—starting topics, and making him pursue them.' Ib. Sept. 28. One day he recorded:—'I did not exert myself to get Dr. Johnson to talk, that I might ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... then—one from the city and one from the country, a married woman and this poor girl," said he, in a jeering tone; "does little Reine know that she is playing second fiddle?" ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... wish they would not say anything kind and pleasant and cheap. At college they praised my verses, and the theatres stole my music for the Pudding play, and the girls giggled over my sketches. And now, at twenty-six, I don't know whether I want to fiddle, or to write an epic, or to model, or to paint. I am a ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... sa, like a fiddle, and hope a please you when we get you through sa. Old 'ooman at home sa:' chuckling very much. 'Outside gentleman sa, he often remember old 'ooman ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... at the wide-flung door Stand mute as men of wood. Gleams like a pool the ballroom floor— A burnished solitude. A hundred waxen tapers shine From silver sconces; softly pine 'Cello, fiddle, mandoline, To music deftly wooed— And dancers in cambric, satin, silk, With glancing hair and cheeks like ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... the fiddle a great deal, and have played for Lincoln a number of times. He used to come over to where I was boarding and ask me to play the fiddle for him; and I would take it with me when I went over to visit him, and when he grew weary of telling stories ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... officers resolved to celebrate the event by giving a ball. "This was an enterprise of a desperate character;—building a brig hundreds of miles from a ship-yard was a trifle to giving a ball in the wilderness. True, one fiddle and half a dozen officers were something; refreshments and a military ball-room might be hoped for; but where, pray, were the ladies to come from?" They would not think of dancing with each other, and ladies must be found. Vigorous efforts were made ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... dim-lit by flickering lanthorn, I passed many weary hours, while all about me was a stir and bustle, a confused sound made up of many, as the never-ending tread of feet, the sound of hoarse voices now faint and far and anon clear and loud, the scrape of a fiddle, snatches of rough song, the ceaseless ring and tap of hammers—a very babel that, telling of life and action, made my gloomy prison the harder to endure. And here (mindful of what is to follow) I do think it well to describe ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... sore I misdoubt me it will not. But well it were, well it were! For such things are in the wood, yea and before ye come to its innermost, as may well try the stoutest heart. Therein are Kobbolds, and Wights that love not men, things unto whom the grief of men is as the sound of the fiddle-bow unto us. And there abide the ghosts of those that may not rest; and there wander the dwarfs and the mountain-dwellers, the dealers in marvels, the givers of gifts that destroy Houses; the forgers of the curse that clingeth and ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... you, not you me. Why, look what a stupid old fogy I was then, toddling about the place with too much time on my hands, reading a lot and forgetting everything; and here you came in, gave me something to do, made the little I know of any use, and ran a pretty gold wire down the rusty fiddle of life. If there are any speeches of gratitude to be made, they are ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... feelings, you know,—not our tastes nor our passions. I don't advocate fiddling while Rome is burning. In fact it's only poor, unsatisfied devils that are tempted to fiddle. There is one feeling which is respectable and honorable, and even sacred, at all times and in all places, whatever they may be. It doesn't depend upon circumstances, but they upon it; and with its help, I think, we are a match for any circumstances. I don't mean religion, Miss Whittaker," ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... and Sam jerked his thumb back to show that he meant Si Lee; "sounds like a Chinese laundry. I guess that's the only thing he isn't. He can do any mortal thing but get on in life. He's been a soldier an' a undertaker an' a cook He plays a fiddle he made himself; it's a rotten bad one, but it's away ahead of his playing. He stuffs birds—that Owl in the parlour is his doin'; he tempers razors, kin doctor a horse or fix up a watch, an' he does it in about the same way, ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... see all that was done in and out of Sebastopol, and over all the Crimea. The Czar, however, took care that Sinclair could not join the allies; but where he is and what he is about I must not tell, until the war is over—except that he is not in Russia, and that he will never play first fiddle again in Morayshire." ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... Square. He was a married man, without family. He obtained his livelihood by giving lessons on the flute, on the guitar, and in teaching French during the day, and at night was engaged as second violin in the orchestra of the Opera House; so that he had many strings to his bow, besides those of his fiddle. His wife, a pretty little lively woman, taught young ladies to make flowers in wax, and mended lace in the evenings. They were a very amiable and amusing couple, always at good-natured warfare with each other, and sparring all day long, from the time they met until ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... the toot of the flute, an' the twiddle of the fiddle, Dancin' in the middle, like a herring on a griddle! Up an' down, hands come round, cross into the wall— Faith, hadn't we ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... enough to avail himself of the opportunity of three or four hours' continuous sleep on land. Rodier showed more reluctance, declaring that he was as fit as a fiddle; but Captain Warren bore him away from the crowd of admirers, and stood over him until he, like his ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... and change my dreaming. From the mufflers in which his father, the mountebank, has wrapped the child, to carry him across the heath, a little tumbling-boy emerges in soiled tights. He is half asleep. His father scrapes the fiddle. The boy shortens his red belt, kisses his fingers to us, and ties himself into a knot among the glasses on ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... it. There's a sight more the matter with folks's p'int o' view than there is with the Lord A'mighty's world.—Now, Jo, if you've got that cretur o' yourn into ship-shape,—it always doos seem to me jest like a human cretur that's got the right p'int o' view, that fiddle doos,—jest give it to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... strips covered with mysterious characters. And these settled the business, for I recognised them as a kind of bed-hanging, popular with the commoner class of the Chinese. Nor were further evidences wanting, such as night-clothes of an extraordinary design, a three-stringed Chinese fiddle, a silk handkerchief full of roots and herbs, and a neat apparatus for smoking opium, with a liberal provision of the drug. Plainly, then, the cook had been a Chinaman; and, if so, who was Jos. Amalu? Or had Jos. stolen the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have played second fiddle to you often, do let me take command this time—or, at all events, wait till you see my plot unfolded. Then you can take your part, or leave it alone, or modify to taste. Nothing can ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... right this morning, yet you had to go fiddle-faddling with that architect instead of staying at home where you belonged. And now she's dead. My little girl, my little girl!" And the big man ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... Concerts begin in August. You go to them. You smoke your cigar or cigarette (and I regret to say that you strike your matches during the soft bars of the "Lohengrin" overture), and you enjoy the music. But you say you cannot play the piano or the fiddle, or even the banjo; that you know nothing ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... to live after the Indian fashion. A party of Loyalists who came before us late in the spring, had gone up the river further, but they were no better off than those at St. Ann's. The men caught fish and hunted moose when they could. In the spring we made maple sugar. We ate fiddle heads, grapes and even the leaves of trees to allay the pangs of hunger. On one occasion some poisonous weeds were eaten along with the fiddle heads; one or two died, and Dr. Earle had all he could ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... be serviceable to the Church. But how far we must depend upon new friends, I have learnt by long practice, though I think among great Ministers, they are just as good as old ones. And so I think this important day has made a great hole in this side of the paper; and the fiddle-faddles of tomorrow and Monday will make up the rest; and, besides, I shall see Harley on ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... early to light the fire or go for the cows. Ted crept softly to a corner in the garret and took from the wall an old brown fiddle. It had been his father's. He loved to play on it, and his few rare spare moments were always spent in the garret corner or the hayloft, with his precious fiddle. It was his one link with the old life he had lived ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Giles made his appearance, with an old green bag under his arm. Barton, of course, had the credit of this arrangement, and it made him, for the time, very popular. After a pull at the bottle, Giles began to screw his fiddle, drawing now and then unearthly shrieks from its strings. The more eager of the young men thereupon stole to the house, assisted in carrying in the tables and benches, and in other ways busied themselves to bring about ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... he muttered uneasily. "He fair makes my flesh creep with that doggoned fiddle of his. 'Tis like a child crying in the dark. I wish ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... said Cadge, beaming with satisfaction. "I never like that Opera assignment—dresses and society, second fiddle to the music man—but I wouldn't have missed last night! Minute I saw you in the Van Dam box I knew there'd be the biggest circus ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... more hopeful than you that the repetition of a consonant beginning the second syllable of a dissyllable, to close the preceding syllable, as in "differ", "fiddle", "gobble", etc., wil "be generally accepted", especially in view of the fact that it is alreddy "generally accepted", and needs only to be extended to ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... the singing as sweet as a dream And the fiddle that climbs to the sky, With head 'neath the curtain she stares out—O hark! The music so strange in ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... freshened, the rain began to fall, and the sea rose so high that it was difficult to keep one's footing on the deck. I have spoken of our concerts. We were indeed a musical ship's company, and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the accordion, and the songs of all nations. Good, bad, or indifferent—Scottish, English, Irish, Russian, German or Norse,—the songs were received with generous applause. Once or twice, a recitation, very spiritedly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Mr. Salter was an odd character. Not content with serving dishes of coffee, nor with drawing people's teeth and cutting their hair, he indulged in attempts at fiddle-playing and set up a ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... see them on that day. They said it was the best day of their year. It was a cold day, with much ice and snow. They had a good dinner and after dinner the soldiers danced. On New Year's Day, 1805, they fired off all their guns. The captains let the soldiers go to the Mandan camp. They took their fiddle and danced for the Indians. One soldier danced on his hands with his head down. The Indians liked this dancing very much. They gave the soldiers some ...
— The Bird-Woman of the Lewis and Clark Expedition • Katherine Chandler
... had grown dark and Tonio Kroeger was sitting in his room, there was noise and bustle again on the road and in the house. The picnickers were returning; yes, and from the direction of Elsinore new guests came by bicycle and carriage, and already one could hear in the room below a fiddle tuning up and a clarinet executing nasal runs by way of practice ... Everything promised to make ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... passed from England into Wales, accompanied by certain other lords and attendants. At the passage of Coed Grono, at the entrance into the woods, he dismissed his attendants and pursued his journey undefended, preceded by a minstrel and a singer, the one accompanying the other on the fiddle. ["Tibicinem praeviens habens et precentorem cantilenae ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... belle of the evening. She treated the suitors for the pleasure of the next set with becoming ease and suavity of manner; she knew her worth, and managed accordingly. When the favoured gallant stood by her side waiting for the rudely scraped tune from a screeching fiddle, satisfaction, joy, and triumph over his rivals were pictured on ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... affirmative, and softly discharged herself of her familiar phrase, 'Turn and turn about; one off, one on.' But she spoke so tremulously that she felt called upon to add, 'which fiddle-strings is weakness to expredge ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... Gloomer had time-tabled himself all over the Universe, trying to close in on a Climate that would put him on his Feet and keep him Fit as a Fiddle. ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... is the pride O' chaps an' maidens vur an' wide; They can't keep up a merry tide, But Bob is in the middle. If merry Bob do come avore ye, He'll zing a zong, or tell a story; But if you'd zee en in his glory, Jist let en have a fiddle. ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... the middle of the circle. And the voice grew, not so much in loudness as in sweetness (though it grew louder, too), till it was so sweet that you wanted to cry with pleasure just at the sound of it. It was like nightingales, and the sea, and the fiddle, and the voice of your mother when you have been a long time away, and she meets you at the door when ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... adorns the choir, and under each of the sixty-eight seats are carved misereres, making a larger collection than any other in the country. The subjects range from a horrible representation of the devil with a second face in the middle of his body to humorous pictures of a cat playing a fiddle, and a scold on her way to the ducking-stool in a wheel-barrow, gripping with one hand the ear of the man ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... you dancing now, O chimney-sweeps of Cheltenham, And why are you singing of a May that is fled?— O, there's music to be born, though we pluck the old fiddle-strings, And a world's May awaking where the ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... he would make eyes about it, and then give you a little picture fit to adorn a boudoir. He does every thing with a flourish. If he has never painted Nero performing that celebrated violin-solo over Rome, it is because he despaired of conveying an idea of the tremulous flourish of the fiddle-bow. He reads nature, and translates her, without understanding her. He will prove to you that the cattle of Rosa Bonheur are those of the fields, while he will object to Landseer that his beasts are those of the guinea cattle-show. He blows up grand ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... the picture of health. He was tall, broad, of fair complexion, had sandy hair and blue eyes, and, as he drank his tea, he looked as fit as a fiddle. ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... "Fine's a fiddle-string," replied Bokes. "We done got out all right, I reckon;" and it was plain that he had not taken notice that the schooner was no longer ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... a nachrul sport," complained Ricks. "That's your trouble. When the last fight was on, you set on the fence and listened at a' ole idiot scrapin' a fiddle down ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... with their usual game of drilling every one that they were able to muster for soldiers, after the fashion of Captain Brown's 'rifle practice,' or marching up and down the decks to the strains of Jem Butt's fiddle playing 'Tommy make room for your Uncle,' accompanied by the somewhat discordant noise of their own drums. These amusements after sunset, and scrubbing decks and working at the pumps before sunrise, give us all the much-needed exercise it is impossible ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... child and the stranger resumed their journey; and, by and by, they came to a house by the roadside, where some people were making merry. Young men and rosy-cheeked girls, with smiles on their faces, were dancing to the sound of a fiddle. ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... use is a man who dawdles away his time on a fiddle; of what benefit is he to mankind? Do fiddlers build cities? Do they delve into the earth for precious metals? Do they sow the seed and harvest the grain? No, no; they are ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... many Midsummer-eves under different skies, but never such a one as this. So far, far from all that one associates with this evening. I think of the merriment round the bonfires at home, hear the scraping of the fiddle, the peals of laughter, and the salvoes of the guns, with the echoes answering from the purple-tinted heights. And then I look out over this boundless, white expanse into the fog and sleet and the driving wind. Here is ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... learns to dance and to fence, by the masters of those noble sciences. He becomes a compleat connoisseur in dressing hair, and in adorning his own person, under the hands and instructions of his barber and valet de chambre. If he learns to play upon the flute or the fiddle, he is altogether irresistible. But he piques himself upon being polished above the natives of any other country by his conversation with the fair sex. In the course of this communication, with which ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... He had a passion for violins, and ran himself into debt because he bought so many and such good ones. Once, when visiting his father's house at Ipsden, he shocked the punctilious old gentleman by dancing on the dining-table to the accompaniment of a fiddle, which he scraped delightedly. Dancing, indeed, was another of his diversions, and, in spite of the fact that he was a fellow of Magdalen and a D.C.L. of Oxford, he was always ready to caper and to ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... characteristic of the members of a band. For instance, the first time he may go through the pantomime of playing a fife; the next time, without any pause between, he may imitate the beating of a drum; the next, playing a fiddle, trombone, flute, cymbals, triangle, imitate the drum major, etc. All of the other ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... that! quarrelled. That won't happen, it's quite impossible! Then we drank my health clinking glasses five times and Robert wanted to drink it in wine but Dora said that would never do! The real trouble was this. She always gets furious if she has to play second fiddle to me and yesterday I ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... the war-cry, when 'booty and beauty' is the watchword. Talk not to me about rules and forms in court when the enemy's cannon are pointed at the door, and the flames encircle the cupola! The man whose stoicism would enable him to philosophize coolly under these circumstances would fiddle while the Capitol was burning, and laugh at the horror and anguish that surrounded him in the midst of the conflagration! I claim not the possession of these remarkable feelings. I concede them all to those who think that the ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... is sense? Genius is a peculiar native aptitude, or tendency, to any one calling or pursuit over all others. A man may have a genius for governing, for killing, or for curing the greatest number of men, and in the best possible manner: a man may have a genius for the fiddle, or his mission may be for the tight-rope, or the Jew's harp; or it may be a natural turn for seeking, and finding, and teaching truth, and for doing the greatest possible good to mankind; or it may be a turn equally natural for seeking, and finding, and teaching a lie, and doing ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... the local band of negro musicians drew from their big fiddle, little fiddle, banjo, and bones notes as ear- piercing and limb-lifting, if not as scientific and artistic, as anything ever executed ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... o'er the horse's hair! In unison their various tones to tune. Murmurs the hautboy, growls the hoarse bassoon; In soft vibration sighs the whispering lute, Tang goes the harpsichord, too-too the flute, Brays the loud trumpet, squeaks the fiddle sharp, Winds the French-horn, and twangs the tingling harp; Till, like great Jove, the leader, figuring in, Attunes to order the chaotic din. Rejected Addresses: The Theatre. H. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... Bailie, "you're welcome to a tune on your ain fiddle; but see if I dinna gar ye dance till't ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... goes up to her). The blood money of my daughter? To Beelzebub with thee, thou infamous bawd! Sooner will I vagabondize with my violin and fiddle for a bit of bread—sooner will I break to pieces my instrument and carry dung on the sounding-board than taste a mouthful earned by my only child at the price of her soul and future happiness. Give up your cursed ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... indeed! there's not a woman in London knows my age except Mrs Davis down in the Old Kent Road, and beyond a haricot vein in one of my legs I'm as young as ever I was. Old indeed! There's many a good tune played on an old fiddle. I ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... in silk from head to foot; ain't it a relishin' sight to see her settin' there as fine as a fiddle, and hear folks calling little Amy 'Mis. Laurence!'" muttered old Hannah, who could not resist frequent "peeks" through the slide as she set the table in a most ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... new string for my fiddle, And call to the neighbours to come, And partners shall dance down the middle Until the old pewter-wares hum: And we'll sip the mead, ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... breakfasting at Baiae and Brindisi, and the charm of Bourget hag-rides me. I wonder if this exquisite fellow, all made of fiddle-strings and scent and intelligence, could bear any of my bald prose. If you think he could, ask Colvin to send him a copy of these last essays of mine when they appear; and tell Bourget they go to him from a South Sea Island as literal homage. I have ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had sampled: had tramped through Ireland with a fiddle; through Scotland with a lecture on Palestine, assisted by dissolving views; had been a billiard-marker; next a schoolmaster. For the last three months he had been a journalist, dramatic and musical critic to a Sunday newspaper. Often had I dreamt of ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... fiddle-de-dee!" exclaimed the other traveler, testily; "do you think, old driveler, that a few hours of moderate weather could weaken, effectually, the ice of a river that has been hard frozen for a week? Why, at this moment ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... the music in every limb. He would wave his fiddle-bow a while, then commence playing with desperate energy, moving his whole body to the measure, till the sweat rolled from his brow. A book was lying on the stand before him, but he made no use of it. He often glanced around with a kind of half-triumphant smile at the restless crowd, whose feet could ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... does almost everything. It sinks, it swells, it falls, it leaps, it stands still, it quivers, it gets into one's throat and it breaks; but it goes on beating all the time with more or less regularity, just as the violin clown scrapes his fiddle while he turns somersaults, sticks out his tongue, sits down with frightful suddenness and tumbles in and ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... is a member, and Protopopov is chairman.... The whole town talks and laughs about it, and he alone knows and sees nothing.... And now everybody's gone to look at the fire, but he sits alone in his room and pays no attention, only just plays on his fiddle. [Nervily] Oh, it's awful, awful, awful. [Weeps] I can't, I can't bear it any longer!... I can't, I can't!... [OLGA comes in and clears up at her little table. IRINA is sobbing loudly] Throw me out, throw me out, I can't bear ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... a doctor my mother used to tell about," observed Miss Crilly. "You had to catch hold of his coat-tails if you wanted to ask him a question. And he never would have consultation, no matter how sick anybody was. He said, one could play on a fiddle better than two." ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... obviously nothing to do but exist as cheerfully as might be until the weather improved. The wet had shrunk canvas and rope gear till the tent-guys were as taut as fiddle-strings; and as it did not seem to have occurred to any of the servants to attend to this, an immediate tour of the camp had to be undertaken, in "rubbers" and waterproofs, to slack off guys and inspect the ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... was; for perhaps he calls red orange, as you call it amber," answered the redder Beet; "anyhow he has rather more sense than our neighbour here, with his layer upon layer, and coat over coat, and flaky skin over all. Think of wasting time in such fiddle-faddle proceedings! Grow a good honest fleshy substance, and have done with it, and let people see you know what life is capable of. I always look at results. It is something to get such a body as I do out of the surrounding soil. That is living to some purpose, I consider. Nobody ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... had enough, including the dogs and Maisie's pussies, the older folk moved to the front room. In a jiffy dishes and temporary tables disappeared in that big back kitchen, and the youngsters began their games. By-and-by a fiddle was heard, and I am afraid there was dancing. We had a happy evening. Two-handed cracks, stories, jokes, songs, made the time pass too quickly. It was a novelty to me that all the guests were either Irish or English; fine people, intelligent, wide-awake as to the necessity of advancing ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... called a capstan to have sticking out from it, movable, and fitted into its upper rim, other things called capstan—bars. These, men would push singing a song, while on the top of the capstan sat a man playing the fiddle, or the flute, or some other instrument of music. You and I have seen it in pictures. Our sons will say that they wish they had seen it in pictures. Our sons' sons will say it is all a lie and was never in anything but ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... We were shown the scene of one of these neighborhood vengeances. It is a low house at the side of a ravine, down whose steep slope the beech forest steps persistently erect, as if distrusting gravitation. Thirty Confederates had gathered in that house at a country-side frolic, and the fiddle sang deep in the night. The mountain girls are very pretty, having dark, opalescent eyes, with a touch of gold in them at a side glance, slight, rather too fragile figures, and the singular purity of complexion ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... she cried And laughed untel she like to died! I might go on and tell you all About the supper—and the BALL.— You'd ought to see me twist my heel Through jest one old Furginny reel Afore you die! er tromp the strings Of some old fiddle tel she sings Some old cowtillion, don't you know, That putts the ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... o' gold would buy anything you wanted, Peter says. He told me about it, Peter Fiddle did. Once a boy found a pot o' gold hangin' on to the end of a rainbow. There's always one there, Daddy. Yes, there is, Peter Fiddle says so. An' a boy travelled a long, long way to the end of a rainbow, an' he found it—the pot o' gold. An' he was rich, an' he ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... artist and musician. Music, tone, sound, colour, vibrate in every page of your romances. Had your parents taught you harmony, the piano, and the fiddle, your music would have burst forth along its normal lines. As they merely taught you the alphabet and grammar, your creative faculty turned to literature; you wrote romances full of music, instead of ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... had held his fiddle, and tuned it upon an arm not quite so stout, I should have known without being told that he was the man who had played in the Saint-Michel cabin while Annabel de ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... dreamy look would steal into them, and a happy little smile play about the corners of his thin pale lips. Obligingly he gave Dan lessons, and often the young man would accompany him, in the songs his mother had known and loved in her youth, when old Peter had come wooing with fiddle in hand. ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... a pistol! And he did it out of sheer, devilish vanity—ambition! He had worked himself almost insane, anyhow. I'd warned him that he must take it easy, get all the rest he could. His nerves were like fiddle-strings. And what did he do? Made a night trip to Evanston to superintend a job entirely outside his work. The inspector gave the machines the regular test; but Paul wasn't satisfied. Said they hadn't come ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... considered fully educated until he has reached his middle or even late twenties. Yet instead of speeding up the curriculum in the early school years, we have introduced such important studies as social graces, baton twirling, interpretive painting and dancing, and a lot of other fiddle-faddle which graduates students who cannot spell, nor read a book, nor count above ten without taking off their shoes. Perhaps such studies are necessary to make sound citizens and graceful companions. I shall not contest the point. However, I contend that a ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... of the most mistaken is the cant about the 'mission of genius,' the 'mission of the poet.' Poets, we hear in some quarters, are the anointed kings of mankind—at least, so the little poets sing, each to his little fiddle. There is no greater mistake. It is the practical, prosaical fanatic who does the work; and the poet, if he tries to do it, is certain to put down his spade every five minutes, to look at the prospect, and pick flowers, and moralise on dead asses, ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... melody that made you think the heavens had suddenly opened. Every other sound ceased; the doors and windows were filled with eager faces; the dancers ended in the middle of a quadrille, and the band came in a body to listen. I saw one fat Dutchman holding his fiddle in one hand while he wiped the tears from his eyes with the other. When the song was ended the old Italian took both her hands in his and kissed them, talking at the same time with impossible rapidity; and she smiled and looked as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... the love which tingles through the hearts of your young ladies, and sets you young gentlemen gazing on the evening star,—all that love too will become unfamiliar or ridiculous to an after age; and the young aspirings and the moonlight dreams and the vague fiddle-de-dees which ye now think so touching and so sublime will go, my dear boys, where Cowley's Mistress and Waller's Sacharissa have gone before,—go with the Sapphos and the Chloes, the elegant "charming fairs," and the chivalric "most beauteous princesses!" ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had it come to this that their preacher had to sleep on the prairie! This was a family of hospitable Kentuckians, who were born to a love of music, and the old gentleman was a fiddler, and next to his Bible he loved his fiddle. Of course, we had a grand, good time, and were all filled with joy; and this was the beginning of the churches on the upper waters of the Kansas River. Twelve miles above St. George was Ashland, where we found Bro. N. B. White, father to A. J. White, ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... Margot were wedded, going with their friends one sunny morning up the winding hill-path to the little gray chapel whose walls were hidden in ivy, and whose sorrowful Christ looked down through the open porch across the blue and hazy width of the river. Georges, the baker, whose fiddle made merry melody at all the village dances, played before them tunefully; little children, with their hands full of wood-flowers, ran before them; his old blind poodle smelt its way faithfully by their footsteps; ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... she had ever heard of." To which speech her mother, the Dowager Lady Combmartin, replied, with the directness of statement which made her acquaintance so cautious of differing from her:—"Touching? Romantic? Fiddle-de-dee! You ought to be ashamed of yourself for thinking so at your age, Dorothy. A bargain's a bargain, and in my opinion the bride has got much the best of it. For she's a mawkish, milk-and-water, little ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... not serious," Saunders said. "I have seen him break down before. He is too intense, too strenuous; whatever he does he does with every nerve in his body drawn as taut as a fiddle- string." ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... and cautious concessions, to yield at length to the never-dying charities; unless, indeed, the latter may happen to be kept in abeyance by a downright quarrel, about midnight carousals, a squeaking fiddle, or ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... of the Auction. The Historical Register concludes with a dialogue between Quidam, in whom the audience recognised Sir Robert Walpole, and four patriots, to whom he gives a purse which has an instantaneous effect upon their opinions. All five then go off dancing to Quidam's fiddle; and it is explained that they have holes in their pockets through which the money will fall as they dance, enabling the donor to pick it all up again, "and so not lose one ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... law and had never made a public speech in his life. He was only twenty-seven years of age, and those years had gone over him mainly in idleness. In his boyhood days he had spent his time in fishing, hunting, dancing, and playing the fiddle, instead of working on his father's farm. As he grew older he liked sport too much and work too little to make a living. He tried store-keeping and failed through neglect of his business. He married a wife whose father gave him a farm, but he failed with this, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... society George Hotspur could be bright, and he was proud of being bright. With this woman he was always subdued, always made to play second fiddle, always talked like a boy; and he knew it. He had loved her once, if he was capable of loving anything; but her mastery over him wearied him, even though he was, after a fashion, proud of her cleverness, and he wished ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. Many who have "plied their book diligently," and know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the evening was when the four Masters Tortoise Shell, whose names were Bobstay, Rattle, Clipper, and Dick, came into the room with great white collars and black faces, and began to sing like the Ethiopian Serenaders. Bobstay played the Fiddle, Rattle the Bones, Clipper the Banjo, and Dick the Tambourine, when they sang "Old Dan Tucker," and "Kafoozlum." The four Misses White almost fell off their seats with laughing, and Sir Claude was seen to put the tail of his coat into his mouth; ...
— A Apple Pie and Other Nursery Tales • Unknown
... superfine black, with hat and beaver, mounted on a powerful steed, black and glossy, like that which bore Greduv to the fight of Catraeth. I should wish, moreover, to see the Welshmen assembled on the border ready to welcome me with pipe and fiddle, and much whooping and shouting, and to attend me to Wrexham, or even as far as Machynllaith, where I should wish to be invited to a dinner at which all the bards should be present, and to be seated at the right hand of the president, who, when the cloth was removed, should arise, and, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... the supper table, Mr. Pollock politely informed him that Alix Crown had returned from Michigan, looking as fit as a fiddle. ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... weasel, seems very odd. Spiders, too, are uncomfortable pets; you can't caress them as you could a dormouse; the most you can do is to provide your spider with a clear glass bottle to live in, and teach him to come out in response to a musical sound, drawn from a banjo or fiddle, to take a fly from your fingers and go back ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... Teddy bears, specimens of which, in various sizes, decorated the mantelpiece of her bedroom. She was accustomed to give way, under plaintive protest, to Marjorie's masterful disposition, and, as a rule, played second fiddle with a good grace. She was not at all clever or imaginative, but very affectionate, and had been the pet of the family at home. She was a neat, pretty little thing, with big blue eyes and arched eyebrows ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... Somersetshire farmer's son. He had shut his Latin primer and his English grammar when he left Wells, and had never opened a book since, except his prayer book on Sundays, and then he could scarcely spell out the verse of the psalms, and shouted Tate and Brady to the accompaniment of scraping fiddle and trombone in the gallery of the church, with a refreshing disregard of words, though he supplied deficiencies by mystic utterances which filled in doubtful passages and could be interpreted according to the wishes of ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... seven miles against a strong wind, I was kindly invited to take part in a merry picnic that was just being held there by some farmers of the neighborhood. A very pretty girl asked me to dance, and I afterwards played the fiddle. The scene with the dancers in the foreground on the green sward, and the lake and mountains in the distance, was one of the most poetical I ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... on Sunday we celebrate with church in Webber's blacksmith shop," agreed old Jim, secretly delighted beyond expression. "We won't git gay with anything too high-falootin', but we'd ought to git Shorty Hobb to show up with his fiddle." ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... lowest haunt in the town had a tent south of the Union Pacific tracks; and Cutler, getting his irons, and a man from the saloon, went there, and stepped in, covering the room with his pistol. The fiddle stopped, the shrieking women scattered, and Toussaint, who had a glass in his hand, let it fly at Cutler's head, for he was drunk. There were two customers ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... to singing, Lord bless you, he had a tune with wooden turns to it,—it was most cruel to hear; and then the look of him, those eyes, like dropsical oysters, and the hair standing every way, like a field of insane flax, and the mouth with a curl in it like the slit in the side of a fiddle. A pleasant fellow that for a mess that always boasted the ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... you see, Jim has only just left school, and he feels he can't laugh, and talk, and tell you stories about foreign countries, as this young fellow can, and having been so long accustomed to have you to himself, he naturally would not like the playing second fiddle to ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... poor emigre who gained a precarious livelihood as a dancing-master, cook, teacher, or barber, who was profuse of smiles, shrugs, bows, and compliments, prided himself on la belle France, played the fiddle, and took snuff. A more dignified view succeeded, when we read "Telemaque," so long an initiatory text-book in the study of the language, blended as its crystal style was in our imaginations with the pure and noble character of Fenelon. Perhaps ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... large the saxophone has its friends and its foes. Its detractors agree that the late Emperor Nero was a maligned man; cruel, perhaps, in some of his aspects, but not so cruel as has been made out in the case against him. It was a fiddle he played while Rome burned—it might have been a saxophone. But to the melody-loving heart of the black race in our land the mooing tones of this long-waisted, dark-complected horn carry messages as of great joy. ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... on a sea-chest with a fiddle under his left ear. He was playing the "Shan van vaught," and accompanying the tune, punctuating it, with blows of his left heel on the ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... moment. How they laughed and chaffed and talked, to be sure! Interspersed in the hubbub were now and then snatches of merry song, and now and then the notes of a somewhat squeaky and asthmatical violin, invariably followed by some one shouting, "Stop that awful fiddle!" "Hit 'im in the eye with a bit o' biscuit!" or "Grease his bow!" Then a deeper bass voice, evidently Scotch, and just as evidently a junior surgeon's, saying, "Let the laddie practise.—Fiddle away, my boy; I'll thrash all hands if they meddle ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... sympathise) and also for bindings, which seems to me a weakness—however, it was one which he indulged in moderation. He possessed in his drawing-room (which was not very much used) a beautiful old-fashioned harpsichord, and also he had belonging to him a fiddle of value untold. I ought, of course, to say violin, or rather to distinguish the instrument by its family name; I have no doubt it was a Stradivarius. But there is an affectionate humour in the fiddle which ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... was frank, genial, and pleasant. He had strongly marked features, with a brown complexion, and his clothes, when I saw him, were all brown. He seemed to believe in everything which was to others utterly incredible. He said one day to me, "Why don't you give up your fiddle- faddle of geology and zoology, and turn to the occult sciences!" The historian, then Lord Mahon, seemed shocked at such a speech to me, and his charming wife ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... been a long time since the merry sound of the fiddle had been heard in the village of Brunen. The throne was surrounded by little boys and girls listening with wondering delight at the gay music. But the grown girls stood afar off and did not look even once at the enticing fiddler, but hid themselves ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... heads, the multitude," and another "that any man may turn away his wife, and take another as oft as he pleases": to which last accusation is added the comment, "As you have most learnedly proved upon the fiddle [Tetrachordon], and practised in your life and conversation; for which you have achieved the honour to be styled the founder of a sect." The audience by this time becoming weary, "a worthy knight of this Assembly stood up and said that, if we meant to ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... ten shillings and a supper; from the vicar ten shillings; from the farmers five shillings each; from each cottage-household one shilling; amounting altogether to not more than ten shillings a head annually—just enough, as an old executant told me, to pay for their fiddle-strings, repairs, rosin, and music-paper (which they mostly ruled themselves). Their music in those days was all in their own manuscript, copied in the evenings after work, ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... making a larger collection than any other in the country. The subjects range from a horrible representation of the devil with a second face in the middle of his body to humorous pictures of a cat playing a fiddle, and a scold on her way to the ducking-stool in a wheel-barrow, gripping with one hand the ear of the ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... the fiddler is the pride O' chaps an' maidens vur an' wide; They can't keep up a merry tide, But Bob is in the middle. If merry Bob do come avore ye, He'll zing a zong, or tell a story; But if you'd zee en in his glory, Jist let en have a fiddle. ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... the old guy is O.K. physically, fit as a fiddle. And sound mentally, you bet, except that he's nutty on the supernatural. Why, he showed me the tobacco pouch—you know he tells ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... in the Nibelungenlied in the person of "Volker von Alzeie,'' the warrior who in the last part of the epic plays a part second only to that of Hagen, and who "was called the minstrel (spilman) because he could fiddle.'' It became an imperial city in 1277. In 1620 it was sacked by the Spaniards and in 1689 burnt by the French. Annexed to France during the Napoleonic wars, it passed in 1815 to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to say," returned Nick, apparently not aware of his insolence. "Come, now, I'll tell you what I'll do. My father's got a bill against yours for a dollar and sixty-four cents. I told father I had a use for the fiddle, and he says if you'll give it to me, he'll call it square. There, what do ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... not let him feed, and he is sharp set at an argument when he should cut his meat. He is discarded for a gamester at all games but one and thirty[41], and at tables he reaches not beyond doublets. His fingers are not long and drawn out to handle a fiddle, but his fist clunched with the habit of disputing. He ascends a horse somewhat sinisterly, though not on the left side, and they both go jogging in grief together. He is exceedingly censured by the inns-of-court men, for that heinous ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... the contrary, furnishes, in the anecdotes given of him in Constable's life, a melancholy instance of the degradation into which the human mind may fall, when it suffers human works to interfere between it and its Master. The recommending the color of an old Cremona fiddle for the prevailing tone of everything, and the vapid inquiry of the conventionalist, "Where do you put your brown tree?" show a prostration of intellect so laughable and lamentable, that they are at once, on all, and to all, students of the gallery, a satire ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... for do here, when you leff? 'speck ebbery ting be dull, wuss nor ditch-water. No more fun—no more shuffle-foot. Old maussa no like de fiddle, and nebber hab party and jollication like udder people. Don't tink I can stay here, Mass Ra'ph, after you gone; 'spose, you no 'jection, I go 'long wid you? You leff me, I take to de swamp, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... but he's best marksman just de same. Taint no use talkin, Jim. You can't buck Dave in de woods. But you got de world beat wid uh git-fiddle. Yessuh, Dave is uh sworn marksman but you kin really beat de box. ...
— De Turkey and De Law - A Comedy in Three Acts • Zora Neale Hurston
... of derisive cheers, Tom o' Dint was drawn, wet as a sack, to the opposite bank, and his fiddle was rescued from a ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... animated discussion upon the subject of Glueck's music; and suddenly, some piece from the "Iphigenia" being mentioned, she shouted for her man-servant, to whom on his appearance she gave orders to bring her a chair and footstool, and "the big fiddle" (the violoncello) out of the hall; and taking it forthwith between her knees, proceeded to play, with excellent taste and expression, some of Glueck's noble music upon the sonorous instrument, with which St. Cecilia is the only female I ever saw on ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... not to-night! I want to have a lot of just such concerts so we mustn't put the prima donna out of condition. But I've a little girl here with a fiddle and I tell you she can just make it talk! Come farther forward, Dolly dear, and stand close to me. Then 'rosin your bow' and get to work. Show these cowboys what a little girl-tenderfoot can do. Maybe, too, who knows? Maybe our Jim will hear it wherever he is and hurry back. At ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... overhead were tuning up. There was a flute, a viol, a gittern, a fiddle, and a drum; and behind the curtain, just outside the door, Nick could hear the master-player's low voice giving hasty ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... center of the open space was a large tree. Backed up against this tree, and looking straight at the little boy, with fiddle in position for playing, and uplifted bow, ...
— The Arkansaw Bear - A Tale of Fanciful Adventure • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to treat as trash His noisy fiddle-faddle About his doings with the lash, His feats ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... Charlie. The quaint child had gravely informed her that she looked like Connie and immediately taken her into his confidence regarding his aspirations toward some day playing in "a big band." He had also obligingly favored her with a solo of marvelous shrieks and squawks on his much tortured "fiddle." Mary loved children, and this, perhaps, went far toward stilling the jealousy, which, so far, only faintly stirring, bade fair to one day burst forth into ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... with some others, were, for the most part, as a maul on the head of pride, and desire of vain glory; what, thought I, shall I be proud because I am a sounding brass? Is it so much to be a fiddle? Hath not the least creature that hath life, more of God in it than these? Besides, I knew it was love should never die, but these must cease and vanish; so I concluded, a little grace, a little love, a little of the true fear ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... informed me that gin he had umquhile kent the nowte belangit tae yon ill-hairtet raff, he wad hae whummelt them owre the burn (the Lachlan a burn! O, my country) lang syne, an' no fashit himsel' wi' ony sic' fiddle-fyke. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... The cat and the fiddle, The cow jumped over the moon, The little dog laughed To see the sport, While the dish ...
— The National Nursery Book - With 120 illustrations • Unknown
... endogamous, but show a tendency to become so. The two main subcastes, Raipuria and Ratanpuria, are distinguished by the musical instruments which they play on while begging. That of the Raipurias is a sort of rude fiddle called sarangi, which has a cocoanut shell as a resonator with horsehair strings, and is played with a bow. The Ratanpurias have an instrument called dhungru, which consists of a piece of bamboo about three feet long ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... insist on this "exactly" wherever exactness that is only a mechanical result can be obtained; in the present instance, mind, any deviation from this base of operations, as I may safely say, will land you in no end of difficulties, as everything must be "square with the fiddle," as we have a habit of saying, though the whole is a matter of curves and lines, there being nothing of squareness about it. Having drawn this decided line, I take my half outline, plate 1, and place it exactly where, by tracing close to the side of it, touching ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... blacksmith shop, asked him to swear allegiance and service. "'Brigadier, vous avez raison,'" he added, quoting a well-known song. Then he hummed a little and coughed. "We must have a show"—he hummed again—"we must tickle 'em up a bit—touch 'em where they're silly with a fiddle and fife-raddy dee dee, ra dee, ra dee, ra dee!" Then, to Valmond: "We gave the fools who fought the Little Corporal sour apples in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... as a fiddle now, sir," said the mate testily. "Why, nothing would do me more good than to stretch myself by having a set-to with ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... but as you have not, fortunately for me, and unfortunately for yourself, the dozen men at hand, I am to hold the fiddle while you play upon it, as I have seen a couple ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... into my face, and offered to do business with me at a fiddle.{6} "Tush, tush," said Peter Principal to the increasing multitude which now barred our passage, "we are only come to take a look, and watch the operation of the market." "Dividend hunters{7} I suppose," said a knowing looking fellow, sarcastically, "ear ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... among the broad strings, and ever and anon he would produce from one of them a low, melancholy, almost unearthly sound. And then he would pause, never daring to produce two such notes in succession,—one close upon the other. And these last sad moans of the old fiddle were now known through the household. They were the ghosts of the melody of days long past. He imagined that his visits to the box were unsuspected,—that none knew of the folly of his old fingers which could not keep ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... John, "and neat as a fiddle, with the sweetest little baby ways; but I tell you what 'tis," and John's voice fell to a whisper: "he'll maxim her into heaven a heap sight quicker'n he did t'other one; 'case you see she haint so much—what you call him—so much go off to her ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... of an hour had scarcely passed as they were playing, when a poor old man, who had a fiddle, ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... the 'Royal Edinburgh,' and enjoyed once more the restful calm of a quasi-tropical night, broken only by the Christmas twanging of the machete (which is to the guitar what kit is to fiddle); by the clicking of the pebbles on the shore, and by the gentle murmuring of the waves ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... (Gentlemen) Neither do I believe this, nor will follow it, Thus as I am, I will begin my voyage. When you love, lanch it out in silks and velvets, I'le love in Serge, and will outgo your Sattins. To get upon my great horse and appear The sign of such a man, and trot my measures, Or fiddle out whole frosty nights (my friends) Under the window, while my teeth keep tune, I hold no handsomness. Let me get in, There trot and fiddle where I may ...
— The Spanish Curate - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... gwine leave Pete home ter take keer dem chillen, an' I done set him a good job o' whitewashin' to do while I'm gone, too. De principles' weddin'-present I gwine fetch Pete is a fiddle. Po' Pete been wantin' a good fiddle all his life, an' he 'ain't nuver is had one. But, of co'se, I don't 'low ter let him play on it tell de full ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... takes with him is an old sheepskin jacket, in which he finds the wishing-box, which had been, unknown to him, the cause of his father's prosperity. When the "slave" of the box appears, the hero merely asks for a fiddle that when played upon makes everybody who hears it to dance.[FN388] He hires himself to the King, whose daughter gives him, in jest, a written promise to marry him, in exchange for the fiddle. The King, when the hero ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... end matters one way or another and be done with the horror. And whiles we crawled thus round and round within this narrow space, ever and anon above the stealthy rustle of his movements, above his stertorous breathing and evil muttering, above the wild throbbing of my heart rose the wail of the fiddle ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... me dis mornin' I kin smell de fust o' June. I 'clar', I b'lieve dat mockin'-bird could play de fiddle soon! Dem yonder town-bells sounds like dey was ringin' in ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... have thought he was using Dryfoos, when Dryfoos was using him, and he may have supposed he was not afraid of him when he was very much so. His courage hadn't been put to the test, and courage is a matter of proof, like proficiency on the fiddle, you know: you can't tell whether you've got ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... not, is; and one, who is not, we see; Fiddle, we know, is diddle; and diddle, we take it, ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... and then they could not take him up. They never could arrest Charles Fox. I have known him in as much trouble as anyone. Once he sent all his furniture to my house from his lodgings. He lodged in Bury-street. I always look at the house when I pass by. Don't fiddle the pens; I hate people who fiddle. Where is Gregory? where is my bell' Where is the page? Naughty boy! why do not you come? There, I do not want anything; I do not know what to do. The wicked men! The greatest favourite I had: he was so charming! Charming people are never rich; ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... music was positive pain to him. Upon his hearing a celebrated performer go through a hard composition, and hearing it remarked that it was very difficult, he said, "I would it had been impossible."' Yet he had once bought a flageolet, though he had never made out a tune. 'Had I learnt to fiddle,' he said, 'I should have done 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 ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... of a take-down for the bleeder, ain't it, 'avin' to play second fiddle,' said Philpot with a ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... painted windows Hide the concerts of the quality; The poor can but share A crack'd fiddle in the air, Which offends ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... thunders loud, Some a mazurka occupies, Crushing and a confusing noise; Spurs of the Cavalier Guard clash, The feet of graceful ladies fly, And following them ye might espy Full many a glance like lightning flash, And by the fiddle's rushing sound The voice of jealousy ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... the streets of a far city,—those two atoms shaken into contact while the gods affected to be engaged with weightier matters,—the cultured widow of that derelict recalled the name of a gentleman in the East who was accustomed to buy tall clocks and fiddle-backed chairs, in her native New England, paying prices therefor to make one, in that conservative locality, rich beyond the dreams of ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... presented the painter to his friends, and also gave much advice about how he should conduct himself. He also loaned him a fiddle and presented him a viola da gamba, and often invited him to dinner. For these favors Gainsborough promised to paint a portrait of Thicknesse, but never got beyond washing in the background. During ten years he made thirty-seven excuses for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... thing was hard to stand! The music-master could not stand it, But rushing forth with fiddle-stick in hand, As savage as a bandit, Made up directly to the tattered man, And thus in broken sentences began: "Com—com—I say! You go away! Into two parts my head you split— My fiddle cannot hear himself a bit, When I do ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... nor in-toed, and to set their feet down with a gentle forward pressure, rather like the Australian's stealthy footfall. Talking among themselves, or waiting for friends, they did not drum with their fingers, fiddle with their feet, or feel the hair on their faces. These things seem trivial enough, but when breeds are in the making everything is worth while. A man told me once—but I never tried the experiment—that ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... shoe-buckle (this was in the vigour of his youth, and the prime force of his invention), and a Chinese pavilion, the most hideous building in the world. He could drive a four-in-hand very nearly as well as the Brighton coachman, could fence elegantly, and it is said, played the fiddle well. And he smiled with such irresistible fascination, that persons who were introduced into his august presence became his victims, body and soul, as a rabbit becomes the prey ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and it's near time for going. I'm playing very well lately, James. It's the thought of being before people who'll know music. If I was staying in this place any longer, James, I'd put my fiddle in the thatch, and leave it there for the birds to pick ...
— Three Plays • Padraic Colum
... road. Mrs. Lathrop, it was another road o' hills, 'n' I must say 's the sight made my blood run cold for the third time in one day. F'r a minute I thought seriously o' jus' takin' a train away ag'in 'n' lettin' Cousin Marion fiddle alone f'r another fifty years, f'r I give you my word o' honor, Mrs. Lathrop, 's I was 'most dead, 'n' Lord only knows what made me keep on, f'r what came after was enough to shake my faith in the Lord forever 'f I really believed 's any one but Cousin Marion had one word to say in the ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... musician—that it possesses all sciences, and, in short, is a philosopher. You have often said that God made all things, and that no cause can produce an effect unlike itself. From hence it will follow, not only that the world is animated, and is wise, but also plays upon the fiddle and the flute, because it produces men who play on those instruments. Zeno, therefore, the chief of your sect, advances no argument sufficient to induce us to think that the world reasons, or, indeed, that it is animated at all, and consequently none to think ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... to escape any more meals in the Casa Veronese, but took Marianina for one or two pleasant walks, and told her stories and sang to her in the grenier, while she improvised for him clever little obbligatos on her fiddle. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... trample down all this sentimental fiddle-de-dee, what was the plain English of the case so far as she was concerned? Unbidden, innumerable circumstances stored from local knowledge offered themselves as guides for argument. Take any girl of that class—well, what are her chances? ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... her, uttering fearful curses. If he caught her praying, he said, he would "give her hell." Mary was a member of the Methodist Church in Washington. There were several pious people in the company; and at night, when the driver found them melancholy and disposed to pray, he had a fiddle brought, and made them dance in their chains, whipping them till they complied. Mary at length became so weak that she really could travel on foot no further. Her feeble frame was exhausted, and sank beneath accumulated sufferings. She was seized with a ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... Jean tuned his fiddle afresh, and placing it with a knowing jerk under his chin, and with an air of conceit worthy of Lulli, began to sing and play ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... to the accounts of Oloffe and his followers may be traced the various traditions handed down of this marvelous strait—as how the devil has been seen there, sitting astride of the Hog's Back and playing on the fiddle—how he broils fish there before a storm; and many other stories, in which we must be cautious of putting too much faith. In consequence of all these terrific circumstances, the Pavonian commander gave this pass the name of Helle-gat, or, as it has been interpreted, Hell-gate;[30] ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... and in that matter his weapons are neither his prestige nor his popularity, but those by which Philip said that any fortress could be taken—if only an ass laden with gold could make its way up into it. Farthermore, that precious consul, playing as it were second fiddle to Pompey,[105] is said to have undertaken the business and to have bribery agents at his house, which I don't believe. But two decrees have already passed the house of an unpopular character, because they are thought to be ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... as they sing, as if they were catching some of the words from her. She beats time with her finger to see that they learn correctly. Other voices take up the song in right background, swelling it higher and higher. Uncle Ned, with his fiddle under his arm, comes slowly from right to join the group in foreground. The baskets are set down. The boy leans on his hoe, the girl on her wooden rake, rapt and happy. All are given over to the rhythmic joy of ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... Cambridge University by the scholarships and prizes which he had won. One beautiful little dark-eyed daughter of seven was playing in a West End Theatre as the dormouse in "Alice in Wonderland." She was second fiddle to Alice herself, also, and could sing all her songs. Her pay was some five pounds a week, poor enough for the attraction she proved, but more than all the rest of the family put together earned. At that time I never went to theatres. Acquaintances had ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... hotelled at the 'Royal Edinburgh,' and enjoyed once more the restful calm of a quasi-tropical night, broken only by the Christmas twanging of the machete (which is to the guitar what kit is to fiddle); by the clicking of the pebbles on the shore, and by the gentle murmuring of the waves ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... her fiddle-case with her; and to offer to carry it for her seemed an easy way out of my difficulty; but she would not surrender it for a while. I asked her if she had been playing at a concert, or if she were coming from a lesson. No; well, then, why had ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... going," said the doctor. "You two can chat for a while. Don't tire yourself out, young man, and in a day or two you will be fit as a fiddle. Wish I had your physique! That system of yours is a natural shock absorber. We run across them once in a long while—half-killed one day and back the next hunting ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... Cornwall, May-day seems to have been known by the name of Furry Day. Perhaps a corruption of "Flora's Day." People wore hawthorn in their hats, and danced hand-in-hand through the town to the sound of a fiddle. This particular performance was ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... gazed a moment in silence, and then rushed en masse upon the intruder, the landlord bringing up the rear, and sounding a charge upon his fiddle. But, as they drew nigh, the black cloak began to assume a familiar look; the hat, also, was an old acquaintance; and, these being removed, from beneath them shone forth the reverend face ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... reader may have observed that the second fiddle is generally a little louder and more sharp set than the first. On this occasion that instrument was played upon by the worthy deputy, to the amazement of all the connoisseurs in that species of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... no storm-door, and the interior of the chateau—at least, the wing in which I found myself—was almost as cold as the outside. I stood still, hesitating which way to take. A fiddle was being played somewhere, and the bursts of noisy laughter ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... himself relate. That he did never come to deliver any letters from his master, but ever he was placed in the lobby; the hangings being turned towards him, where he might see the queen dancing to a little fiddle; which was to no other end than that he should tell his master, by her youthful disposition, how likely he was to come to the possession of the crown he so much thirsted after: for you must understand, the wisest in that kingdom did believe the king ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... sometimes put in some of those round characters of clouds, they must do the same; but if you look at any of their skies, they either assist in the composition or make some figure in the picture—nay, sometimes play the first fiddle.... ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... Earth;' the fifth, 'The Bones of all People;' till the dance really begins in the sixth. Death, a skeleton, as seen through the rest of the designs, sometimes playing on a guitar or lute, sometimes carrying a drum, bagpipes, a dulcimer, or a fiddle, now appearing with mitre on head and crozier in hand to summon the Abbot; then marching before the parson with bell, book, and candle; again crowned with ivy, when he seizes the Duke, claims his partners, beginning with ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... few weeks back, all the critics have spoken of "A Ballad of a Nun," and admitted its surprising strength and beauty. They have left me in the plight of that belated fiddle in "Rejected Addresses," or of the gentleman who had to be content with saying "ditto" to Mr. Burke. For once they seem unanimous, and for once they are right. The poem is beautiful ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... it is not serious," Saunders said. "I have seen him break down before. He is too intense, too strenuous; whatever he does he does with every nerve in his body drawn as taut as a fiddle- string." ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... the sun, in comes the Times and eleven strikes (it does) already, and I have to go to Town, and I have no alternative but that this story of the Critic and Poet, 'the Bear and the Fiddle,' should 'begin but break off in the middle'; yet I doubt—nor will you henceforth, I know, say, 'I vex you, I am sure, by this lengthy writing.' Mind that spring is coming, for all this snow; and know me ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... met two hackney coaches driving very rapidly. The first of them contained one of our boatswain's mates and the coxswain of the launch with their delicate ladies. On the roof was another of our men playing the fiddle. I expected to see him fall off every moment, but, like a true sailor, he had learnt to hold fast. The second coach contained the men's hats and their ladies' bonnets. As they were not allowed to go farther than Plymouth, they had been driving from Dock to that place ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... Dan, returning the gift with precision. "Ef you don't like my music, git out your fiddle. I ain't goin' to lie here all day an' listen to you an' Long Jack arguin' 'baout candles. Fiddle, Tom Platt; or I'll learn Harve here ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... interview with a woman if she is putting on new gloves! She is perfectly free to seem occupied or not, as suits her convenience; and she can, by wrestling with the gloves, interrupt him without speech, distract his attention, fiddle his thoughts, give him a sense of imbecile futility, and all the time offer him no cause for resentment against her. He himself seems in the wrong; she is merely ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... too, are welcome as the flowers in May for their own sake; some of them may have a human voice; some may have that magic which transforms a wooden box into a song-bird, and what we jeeringly call a fiddle into what we mention with respect as a violin. From that grinding lilt, with which the blind man, seeking pence, accompanies the beat of paddle wheels across the ferry, there is surely a difference rather of kind than of degree ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... men to considerations of speculative truth became conceivable. The way in which the axioms of sages slip off from multitudes, as mere vague "glittering generalities," good enough for cherishers of the "intuitions" to lisp of by moonlight, but sheer fiddle-dee-dee to firmly built men,—the commentary of the able lawyer upon Emerson's lecture, "I don't understand it, but my girls do!"—all this appears in a new light. Are not most men working along some cliff, financial or other, after a bird? And do they not honestly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... Nation familiar to our childhood proved a poor migr who gained a precarious livelihood as a dancing-master, cook, teacher, or barber, who was profuse of smiles, shrugs, bows, and compliments, prided himself on la belle France, played the fiddle, and took snuff. A more dignified view succeeded, when we read "Tlmaque," so long an initiatory text-book in the study of the language, blended as its crystal style was in our imaginations with the pure and noble character of Fnelon. Perhaps the next link in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... hearty manner. "Exercise, old boy! You ought to try it. Greatest thing in the world. Just took a row to the end of the piers and back, and I'm as fit as a fiddle!" ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... for you," said Mother Gaillarde, "for it is commonly to waste time over some sort of fiddle-faddle that I despise. You are heartily welcome to it, I can tell you! Now, come, Sister Ada, don't be silly and set a bad example. It is all nonsense, and you ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... Scot, a Highlander of the Isles, sat upon a barrel-head sawing at a fiddle, and the shrill scream of it filled the barn. Tone he did not aspire to, but he played with Caledonian verve and swing, and kept the snapping time. It was mad, harsh music of the kind that sets the blood tingling and the feet to move in rhythm, ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... the slaves were grouped so as to give occasion for a general frolic. Thus Daniel R. Tucker in 1858 sent a general invitation over the countryside in central Georgia to a sextuple wedding among his slaves, with dinner and dancing to follow.[2] On the whole, the fiddle, the banjo and the bones were ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... you go not away so, 705 But wait until the fiddle come, O wait until you hear the drum, Then how to move you'll scarcely know So dead with ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... Hayes, who has returned from lumbering in Canada to make a living at home. The motif of the tale is the unconscious competition of the two friends, of whom Andy is very willing to play "second fiddle," did not character and brains force him to the front. The young squire of Halton is too selfish and capricious to succeed, and in spite of his loyalty to friendship, Andy finds himself driven to take his place both in love and ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... occasion in his own life, when he was most affected by the emotions of the sublime was when he stood upon one of the summits of the Cordillera, and surveyed the magnificent prospect all around. It seemed, as he quaintly observed, as if his nerves had become fiddle strings, and had all taken to rapidly vibrating. This remark was only made incidentally, and the conversation passed into some other branch. About an hour afterwards Mr. Darwin retired to rest, while I sat up in the smoking-room with one of his sons. We continued ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... struck up between Frohman and Stoddart, who, in a way, was a character. He played the violin, and when business was bad and the company got in the dumps Stoddart added to their misfortunes by playing doleful tunes on his fiddle. But that fiddle had a virtue not to be despised, because it was Stoddart's bank. In its hollow box he secreted his modest savings, and in more than one emergency they were drawn on for company bed and board. ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... He was jealous of her! Sally laughed almost scornfully. Fancy a big fellow like Toby being jealous of a little thing like her. Men! They were all alike. All right as long as they were playing first fiddle! That was it: Toby didn't want her to have a chance at all. He wanted her always to be number two. Sally shook her ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... Wylie. Dat come 'bout on de second pay day. De other nigger gals say her marry me for my money but I never have believed it. White ladies do dat 'kalkilating' trick sometime but you take a blue-gum nigger gal, all wool on de top of her head and lak to dance and jig wid her foots, to pattin' and fiddle music, her ain't gonna have money in de back of her head when her pick out a man to marry. Her gonna want a man wid muscles on his arms and back and I had them. Usin' dat pick and shovel on de railroad just give me what it took to git Mary. ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... assailed by the faintly pungent scent of the shrubs in the plantation. Higher and higher they climbed, sensible with each step of a greater isolation, of a rarer, clearer air. Above them, in one of the higher houses in the rue Mueller, some one was playing a fiddle, and the piercing sweet sounds came through the night like a human voice, adding the poignancy, the passion and pathos of human things to the aloofness ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... the Bailie, "you're welcome to a tune on your ain fiddle; but see if I dinna gar ye dance ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... isolation, and found, as is not utterly uncommon, quite a few maids and matrons among the households of the absent soldiery quite willing to be consoled and comforted. There were bright lights, therefore, further along the edge of the steep, beyond those of the hospital, and the squeak of fiddle and drone of 'cello, mingled with the plaintive piping of the flute, were heard at intervals through the silence of the wintry night. No tramp of sentry broke the hush about the little rift between the ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... were thrown open to the company. We had refreshments in abundance and great variety, and at a certain hour, we were astounded by the clamor of tamborine and fiddle giving due notice to the dancers. Among my few social accomplishments, this of dancing had never been included. Naturally, I should, perhaps, be considered an awkward man. I was conscious of this awkwardness ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... abundance of wood, fires were lighted, provisions cooked, and the shipwrecked crew prepared to make themselves as happy as they could. Some, indeed, when they had knocked off work, amused themselves by playing leapfrog on the sands, and running races; and the black cook, who had brought his fiddle, beginning to scrape away, set the whole dancing. At last they were ordered to turn in, and though it was not likely that any enemy was near, sentries were stationed round the camp, ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... they tormented him a lot," admitted her husband. "He's a great hand at the fiddle and likes company. He goes to the harbour a good deal. But they say he takes sulky spells when he hasn't a word to throw to a dog. 'Twouldn't be any wonder, living with the Gordons. They're all as ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... hearing of music is always attended with movements, however imperceptible, in the throat, which, being true, would prove that, in a fashion, we perform the melodies which we think we only hear; living echoes, nerves vibrating beneath the composer's touch as literally as does the string of the fiddle, or its wooden fibres. A very delicate instrument this, called the Hearer, and, as we all know, more liable to being out of tune, to refusing to act altogether, than any instrument (fortunately for performers) hitherto made by the hand of man. Thus, in ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... were in fact too many for her,—and that her efforts to overcome them, and to face the realities of the world, had exhausted her. This was, of course, not said openly, at the town-cross of Exeter; but such was the opinion which Mr. Martin gave in confidence to the mother. "Fiddle-de-dee!" said Camilla, when she was told of feelings, susceptibilities, and hysterics. At the present moment she had a claim to the undivided interest of the family, and she believed that her sister's ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... of the frigate saw all this, and he beheld at the same time the clusters of happy sailors, sauntering with light step and pleasant faces up and down the waist and gangways; and he heard, too, the scraping of a fiddle on the forecastle, the shuffling, dancing feet, and the least notion of a jovial sea-song coming up from the gun-deck. Yes, it must have been a glorious pride with which that gallant officer gazed around him from the quarter-deck of the ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... Wentworth was the "great buck" of his day, and was wont to fiddle at Stoodley's far into the morning for sheer love of fiddling and revelry. Stoodley's has now fallen indeed! It is the brick building marked "custom-house," and it stands at the corner ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... he buried his face in his hands. "That was ignorance, an' I'm payin' for it by havin' you turn away an' snap my future like a fiddle string! Oh, how could my hand a-struck ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... former. As I knew Mr. Joseph Spence,(387) I do not think I should have been so much delighted as Dr. Kippis with reading his letters. He was a good-natured, harmless little soul, but more like a silver penny than a genius. It was a neat, fiddle-faddle, bit of sterling, that had read good books and kept good company, but was too trifling for use, and only fit ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... handfuls. Why, he told me to my face that I was a-getting old; old indeed! there's not a woman in London knows my age except Mrs Davis down in the Old Kent Road, and beyond a haricot vein in one of my legs I'm as young as ever I was. Old indeed! There's many a good tune played on an old fiddle. I hate his ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... "Fiddle-de-dee! Do give over snuffing and snivelling and sobbing, and tell me if you want your warm petticoat in the saddle-bag. You'd make a saint for to swear!" More sobs, and one or two disjointed words, were all that came in answer. The sobbing sister, ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... from his own lips about what he had done and said. He was still the unaffected countryman, seemingly careless, happy and indolent. It was on the occasion of one of these family gatherings that a contemporary saw him and wrote: "In mock complaint he exclaimed, 'How can I play the fiddle with two babies on each knee ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... LADY G. Fiddle-faddle, silly man! And so you said before. If you thought so, you take the way, (don't you?) to mend the matter, by dancing and capering about, and putting yourself into all manner of disagreeable attitudes; and even sometimes being ready to foam at the ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... at her from the sofa, on which he sprawled at length. "My good child, your nerves are like fiddle-strings after a frost. Remind me to make you up a tonic when we get back! ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... crossing, we were astonished to see a man seated in a sulky in the middle of the river and playing for his life on a fiddle. The horse was up to his middle in water, and it seemed as if the flimsy vehicle was ready to be swept away by the current. Still the fiddler fiddled on composedly as if his life had been insured. We thought ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... plays the fiddle fit to tear the heart out of your body, and reads big books till God knows what hour in the mornin'. His father, he says he don't know what to do with him ... There's a big, bad devil of a Polack down to the ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... almost destitute of many of the comforts of life," in order to get into the presence of his father's winter-worn locks, and spread a humid veil of darkness around his expectations; but he was always promptly sent back to the cold charity of the combat again; he learned to play the fiddle, and made a name for himself in that line; he had dwelt among the wild tribes; he had philosophized about the despoilers of the kingdoms of the earth, and found out—the cunning creature —that they refer their differences to the learned for settlement; he had achieved a vast ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... who came before us late in the spring, had gone up the river further, but they were no better off than those at St. Ann's. The men caught fish and hunted moose when they could. In the spring we made maple sugar. We ate fiddle heads, grapes and even the leaves of trees to allay the pangs of hunger. On one occasion some poisonous weeds were eaten along with the fiddle heads; one or two died, and Dr. Earle had all he could ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... scarabs," she laughed, "while beneath you Caracuna riots and revolutes and massacres foreigners. Nero with his fiddle ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... had died ere I had seen it; why didst not make me acquainted when thou wert first resolv'd to be a whore, I would have seen thy hot lust satisfied more privately: I would have kept a dancer and a whole consort of musicians in my own house only to fiddle thee. ...
— A King, and No King • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... furnace-blaze, or at the corn-shucking; In Virginia, the planter's son returning after a long absence, joyfully welcomed and kissed by the aged mulatto nurse. On rivers, boatmen safely moored at nightfall, in their boats, under shelter of high banks, Some of the younger men dance to the sound of the banjo or fiddle—others sit on the gunwale, smoking and talking; Late in the afternoon the mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing in the Great Dismal Swamp-there are the greenish waters, the resinous odour, the plenteous moss, the cypress-tree, and the juniper-tree. ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... name because he always smiled over a crust of bread, even when he was a baby. Now that he was a little lad of ten with a great flock of ewes and lambs to tend and drive through sun and storm, he had smiles and kind words for all, and he played his fiddle all day long until its sweet tunes ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... Fielding's. Even at that time, libertine as it was in some ways, and sentimental as it was in others, people had not failed to notice that Pamela's virtue is not quite what was then called "neat" wine—the pure and unadulterated juice of the grape. The longueurs and the fiddle-faddle, the shameless and fulsome preface-advertisements and the rest lay open enough to censure. So Fielding saw the handles, and gripped them at once by starting a male Pamela—a situation not only offering "most excellent differences," ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... alert to solve the frequent riddle, To judge if Jones should have his train-fare free, Whether the band requires another fiddle, And which is senior, Robinson or me? Who shall indite such circulars as his To Officers Commanding Companies About their musketry, or why it is So many men take ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... back my Frost, or put a locked clasp on Arvine, my career must be extinguished. Give me back Frost, and, if life and health are spared, I will write another dozen of volumes yet before I hang up my fiddle—if so serious a confusion of metaphors may be pardoned. I know from long experience how kind and considerate both the late and present superintendents of the reading-room were and are, but I doubt how far either ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... perseverance. In his eighth year, under the superintendence of his father, he had written a sonata, which, however, along with many other juvenile productions, he lately destroyed; and as he played about three times a week in the churches and at private musical parties, upon a fiddle nearly as large as himself, he soon began to make himself known among his townsmen. At this time he received much benefit from one Francesco Gnecco, who died in 1811, and whom he always ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... is an extremely poor, landlocked country, highly dependent on farming (wheat especially) and livestock raising (sheep and goats). Economic considerations have played second fiddle to political and military upheavals during more than 16 years of war, including the nearly 10-year Soviet military occupation (which ended 15 February 1989). Over the past decade, one-third of the population fled the country, with Pakistan ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... "Precisely the fiddle-stick, Mr Forster! you did mean it, and you do mean it, and this is all the return that I am to expect for my kindness and anxiety for your welfare—slaving and toiling all day as I do; but you're incorrigible, Mr Forster: ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... replied; "he's dreadfully inclined to music since he had a drum, and I want the fiddle to see if I can't make another Pickaninny or an Old Bull of him. Jews-harps is simple, though I can't see how King David played on one of 'em, and sung his psalms at the same time; but the fiddle is best, because genius can show itself plainer on it ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... like a turnip through the beastly parts, and woke up for the bit from Dumbarton on. I also had the luck to remember what you said about the breakfast and took the precaution of wiring for it. Here I am, and as fit as a fiddle." ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... of the Bible in syllabic characters; and the minister had given the silver-plated wedding ring. The nuns had presented a supply of skim-milk and butter. Mr. Spear provided jam, pickles, and coal-oil for the lamps. The Mounted Police contributed two dollars to pay for the "band"—the fiddle and the concertina—and ammunition enough for the feu de joie. The friends and relations had given a plentiful store of fresh, dried, and pounded fish; and had also furnished a lavish supply of moose, caribou, and bear meat; as ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... "Orlando Innamorato" of poor Ferrarese Boiardo. Moreover, Ariosto has many qualities unknown to Boiardo; wit, malice, stateliness, decided eloquence and power of simile and apostrophe; he is a symphony for full orchestra, and Boiardo a mere melody played on a single fiddle, which good authorities (and no one dare contest with Italians when they condemn anything not Tuscan as jargon) pronounce to be no Cremona. All these advantages Ariosto certainly has; and I do not quarrel with those who ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... Panney. "The young man and that Cicely Drane of yours have agreed to marry each other, and I suppose the old lady will live with them, and Miriam will have to get down from her high horse and agree to play second fiddle, or go to school again. She is too ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... And as technique determines the design of a boat, or of a waggon, or of a plough-share, so it controls absolutely the fashioning of tools, and is responsible for any beauty of form they may possess. Of all tools none, of course, is more exquisite than a fiddle-bow. But the fiddle-bow never could have been perfected, because there would have been no call for its tapering delicacy, its calculated balance of lightness and strength, had not the violinist's technique reached such ...
— Progress and History • Various
... ain't a better judge of musical instruments in the whole world than what I am. I had an uncle,' says he, 'that was a partner in a piano-factory, and I've seen thousands of 'em put together. I know all about musical instruments from a pipe-organ to a corn-stalk fiddle. There ain't a man lives, sir, that can tell me any news about any instrument that has to be pounded, blowed, scraped, grinded, picked, or wound with ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... sort of terrace with a wild garden all round. It must have been very pretty before the war, even in its deserted state it is very nice; forget-me-nots and bits of lake and stream everywhere. I feel as fit as a fiddle and am ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... Hotspur could be bright, and he was proud of being bright. With this woman he was always subdued, always made to play second fiddle, always talked like a boy; and he knew it. He had loved her once, if he was capable of loving anything; but her mastery over him wearied him, even though he was, after a fashion, proud of her cleverness, and he wished that she were,—well, dead, if ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... the wheel with the right hand and slapped his leg. "I thought so. Do you know who that young man with the fiddle ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... evening, Macora provided a varied entertainment for his guests. It included a grand feast, with songs and dancing, the latter done to the sounds of the tom-tom drum, and one-stringed African fiddle. ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... work in one way, it can only produce one kind of result (genetic character), but the particular form or quality (Lamarckian "acquired character") of the result will depend upon the hand that works the machine (environment), just as the quality of the sound produced by a fiddle depends entirely upon the hand which plays upon it. It would be improper to apply the term "mutation" to those genetic characters which are not new characters or new variants of old characters, but such genetic characters are ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... terribly aggravated by a private who had been standing next to me having overprimed his musket, with the consequence that when he fired, my face being so close, the powder flew up and caught my wound, which though only originally a slight one soon made me dance for a time without a fiddle. ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... half-breeds sauntered about, flashing bright teeth and wicked dark eyes at whom it might concern; the traders gazed stolidily over their little black pipes, and uttered brief sentences through their thick black beards. Everywhere was gay sound—the fiddle, the laugh, the song; everywhere was gay color—the red sashes of the voyageurs, the beaded moccasins and leggings of the metis, the capotes of the brigade, the variegated costumes of the Crees and Ojibways. Like the wild roses around the edge of the ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... There will be woe indeed, lords; the sly whoresons Have got a speeding trick to lay down ladies. A French song and a fiddle has ...
— The Life of Henry VIII • William Shakespeare [Dunlap edition]
... of something that had once been beautiful with life, whose utter sorrow and hopelessness pierced one at the sight. And so he stood and looked at Elder Harricutt, who shot him one glance and then looking down began to fiddle with his watch chain, halting ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... every faculty was as if enthralled by the swinging iteration of the sweet melancholy melody, rendered with a breadth of effect, an inspiration, it might almost have seemed, incongruous with the infirmities of the crazy old fiddle. He was like a creature under the sway of a spell, and apparently drawn by this dulcet lure of the enchantment of sound was the odd procession that trailed silently after him through these ...
— The Christmas Miracle - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... his separate players, as the conductor does between the instruments in his orchestra. If he does not bring them entirely under his influence, if he (because, like the conductor of a pot-house band, he himself is the first fiddle) does not subordinate himself as carefully to the requirements of the composition, the result will be worthless as a whole, no matter what individual talents may glitter out of it. What should we say if the first fiddle insisted on having ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... grow soft, a dreamy look would steal into them, and a happy little smile play about the corners of his thin pale lips. Obligingly he gave Dan lessons, and often the young man would accompany him, in the songs his mother had known and loved in her youth, when old Peter had come wooing with fiddle in hand. ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... turned my head, or, more definitely—a violin. I bought a fiddle on my own account. Of course my father saw the instrument; if I could keep it out of his sight I could not very well keep it out of his hearing. Then, besides, little boys should not be deceptive. He says: "What are you going to do with ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... did, a little, and that in a very amateurish way I also played the fiddle. I may as well frankly confess that in my inmost heart I rather prided myself upon my musical accomplishments, music being a perfect passion with me. I had often been complimented upon the quality ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... black fellow, with white teeth and bright eyes, and he could play the fiddle and pick the banjo, and knock the bones and cut the pigeon-wing, and, besides all that, he was the best hoe-hand, and could pick more cotton than any other negro on the plantation. He had amused himself by courting and flirting ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... went with you; one side looks on to the street, that is rather dull; but the other looks on to St. James's Park, where I go to walk with Aunt Barbara. We went to the Abbey last Sunday; it reminded me of the churches abroad, and the singing was so beautiful. In Cornwall there was only a fiddle and a cracked flute, and everybody sang out of tune; I did not like going to church there at all. Please write to me soon, Monsieur Horace, and tell me where you are, and what you are doing; I fancy it all to myself—the big ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... contrabands, some with bundles on their backs, some with chairs, buckets and wash-tubs on their heads, others with the family table on their heads. There was an interesting group of three—two male and one female member of the African family. One of the former had brought his banjo, the other his fiddle. The female had a tub well down on her head. These poor frightened people came trotting into the city over the Tenallytown and Brightwood roads, seeking a place of safety inside of ...
— Siege of Washington, D.C. • F. Colburn Adams
... hesitated. Could we ask a man who owned books, and could probably read, to play second fiddle to a woman who could not speak the English language, and who for years, perhaps, had devoted the energies of her soul to the ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... seated on a sea-chest with a fiddle under his left ear. He was playing the "Shan van vaught," and accompanying the tune, punctuating it, with blows of his left heel on the ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... JOE of Grand Old VILL-I-AM, at fust vos pal most chummy, But second fiddle vos not quite the instrument for Brummy. Says he, "Old VILL vants his own vay, the vicked old vote-snatcher! But that arrangement vill not suit ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... you and I, and you were all to me; And round us were the barren lands, but little did we fear; Of all God's happy, happy folks the happiest were we. . . . (Oh, call her, poor old fiddle mine, ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... stoop-shouldered, stuttering, yet with a chord of natural rhetoric in his high fiddle-string of a windpipe, stood looking after them till they passed down the thoroughfare under the jib-sail, and Joe Johnson did not say a word till some marsh brush intervened between them, he being apparently under a remnant of ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... sawed away at the kite line, which was as taut as a string on a bass fiddle. Suddenly there was a loud snap and the cord parted. Sam and Dick fell back from the edge of the cliff, while the entangled kites soared away ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... what comfort is, I tell you: A bed on the floor, a bit of rosin, A fire to thaw our thumbs (poor fellow, The paw he holds up there has been frozen), Plenty of catgut for my fiddle, (This outdoor business is bad for strings), Then a few nice buckwheats hot from the griddle, And Roger and I set ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... grange, far spreading to the sight, The gentle kine, the bullocks strong in fight, The garden whiten'd with the comfrey plant, The flowers Saint Mary shooting with the light— ... The far-seen groves around the hermit's cell, The merry fiddle dinning up the dell, The joyous dancing in the hostry court— But now, high song and every joy farewell, Farewell the very ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... with its inky shadows and its crystalline coves. Rilla and her partner swung in among the dancers; she drew a long breath of delight; what witching music Ned Burr of the Upper Glen was coaxing from his fiddle—it was really like the magical pipes of the old tale which compelled all who heard them to dance. How cool and fresh the gulf breeze blew; how white and wonderful the moonlight was over everything! This was ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... ain't for you to say," returned Nick, apparently not aware of his insolence. "Come, now, I'll tell you what I'll do. My father's got a bill against yours for a dollar and sixty-four cents. I told father I had a use for the fiddle, and he says if you'll give it to me, he'll call it square. There, what do you say ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... accounts for everything—the exclamation which you explained deceitfully, and all! Forgive the harsh word, Elfride—forgive it.' He smiled a surface smile as he continued: 'What a poor mortal I am to play second fiddle in everything and to ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... maiden voices rising upon the wintry air, and the tumbling of glossy curls underneath the hoods and sealskin caps as they sped through the delightful hours. Tullie Wasson was out there with his string band—Tullie with his old black fiddle, and Jim Grey with his cornet, and his son with his wondrous bass violin, and Tullie knew all the good old tunes, and a few fancy waltzes and polkas, but he was at his best in the Virginia Reel, and it was a pretty sight to see the joyous couples ranging off to their positions ...
— Shawn of Skarrow • James Tandy Ellis
... Folker guarded the door with his fiddle bow, one side of which was a trenchant sword, the battle began. The Burgundians taunted the Huns with their weakness and cowardice until they ventured into the hall and were cut down by Hagan and his desperate men. When evening fell the thousand and four who had entered ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... [Transcriber's Note: superfluous 'be'] "be screwed to its sticking place," when we think upon the wonderous genius of the aforesaid Thomas Britton; who, in the midst of his coal cellars, could practise upon "fiddle and flute," or collate his curious volumes; and throwing away, with the agility of a harlequin, his sombre suit of business-cloths, could put on his velvet coat and bag-wig, and receive his concert visitors, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... is strong, lively, and congregational. Sometimes there is more cry than wool in it; but taken altogether, and considering the place, it is creditable. There is neither an organ, nor a fiddle, nor a musical instrument of any sort that we have been able to notice, in the place. All is done directly and without equivocation from the mouth. The members of the choir sit downstairs, in a square ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... and nonsense), Shargar. Do ye think I dinna ken a fiddle whan I see ane, wi' its guts ootside o' 'ts wame, an' the thoomacks to screw them up wi' ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... in making sleds after the manner of the country. They are made of a single plank turned up at one end like a fiddle head, and the baggage is lashed on in bags and sacks. Two other Indians arrived from the woods. ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... strongly marked features, with a brown complexion, and his clothes, when I saw him, were all brown. He seemed to believe in everything which was to others utterly incredible. He said one day to me, "Why don't you give up your fiddle- faddle of geology and zoology, and turn to the occult sciences!" The historian, then Lord Mahon, seemed shocked at such a speech to me, and his charming ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... Mr. Goodfellow. "No, I dare say not; but you just wait till you fall in love. It's a most curious feelin'. First of all it makes you want to pull off your coat and turn a hand to anything, from breakin' stones to playing the fiddle—it don't matter what, so long as you sweat an' feel you're earnin' money. Why, just take a look at my business card!" He stepped to his coat, pulled one from his pocket, and glanced over it proudly: 'George Goodfellow, Carpenter and ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... reflected upon the profound truth conveyed by this finale, at the instant when the composer delivers his last note and the author his last line, when the orchestra gives the last pull at the fiddle-bow and the last puff at the bassoon, when the principal singers say "Let's go to supper!" and the chorus people exclaim "How lucky, it doesn't rain!" Well, in every condition in life, as in an Italian opera, there comes a time when the joke is over, when the trick is done, when people must make ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... not baffle your ingenuity to extricate them. Among other stalked-eyed crustaceans is that with one red, shielding claw, absurdly large, and which scuttles among the roots, making a defiant clicking noise—the fiddle or soldier crab (GELASIMUS VOCANS). Oysters seal themselves to the roots, and various sorts of shell-fish gather together—two or three varieties appear to browse upon the leaves and bark of the mangroves; some excavate galleries in ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... with its thin old walls, vibrates at night like a great dry fiddle; the slightest noises grow great in it, become disfigured and ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... institution of the true critics was of absolute necessity to the commonwealth of learning. For all human actions seem to be divided like Themistocles and his company. One man can fiddle, and another can make a small town a great city; and he that cannot do either one or the other deserves to be kicked out of the creation. The avoiding of which penalty has doubtless given the first birth to the nation of critics, and withal an occasion for their secret detractors ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... your head, but o' my fegs, Ye've set auld Scota on her legs; Lang had she lien wi' beffs and flegs, Bumbaz'd and dizzie, Her fiddle wanted strings and ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... watched with wondering eyes, extracting those marvellously sweet sounds from his wooden instrument, until, with the child's spirit of imitation, as his parents sang their "Volkslieder," the little fellow, perched on a stone bench, gravely handled two pieces of wood of his own as if they were bow and fiddle, keeping exact time, and flourishing the bow in the approved fashion of the schoolmaster. From this very little incident came an important change in his life; for a relation, Johann Mathias Frankh, of Hainburg, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... need give evidence against himself. Besides, business is no worse than every other calling. Do you suppose a lawyer never defends a man whom he knows to be guilty? He says he does it to give the culprit a fair trial. Fiddle-de-dee! He strains every nerve to get the man off. A lawyer is hired to take the side of a company or a corporation in every quarrel. He's paid by the year or by the case. He probably stops to consider whether his company is right, doesn't he? ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... his son again, this brave honest lad, a change seemed to have come over the old man. The boy had been a willing dutiful soldier, everybody said so, and yet they were going to shut him up in prison for five long months, all because of a piece of fiddle-faddle! Devil take them all! What was the use of being a good soldier? And at a stroke every trace disappeared of the obedient and respectful old sergeant who had worn the uniform so proudly; he was peasant pure and simple, hard-headed ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... dainty ear a fiddle charms, A bagpipe's her delight, But for the crooning o' her wheel She disna care a mite. The weary ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... jus' right!" he was continually exclaiming to Jack. "They stop all day now. Have trial in my house. Maybe stay to-night, too. I wish we had a fiddle. We could dance. But we can slap ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... and at the entrance into the wood, he dismissed him and his attendants, though much against their will, and proceeded on his journey unarmed; from too great a presumption of security, preceded only by a minstrel and a singer, one accompanying the other on the fiddle. The Welsh awaiting his arrival, with Iorwerth, brother of Morgan of Caerleon, at their head, and others of his family, rushed upon him unawares from the thickets, and killed him and many of his followers. Thus it appears how incautious and neglectful of itself is too great presumption; ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... my darling! (God! it went through my flesh as thrilling sound Must shake a fiddle when the strings are snatcht! Will she make the life in me all a slave Of my kist body,—a trembling, eager slave? It ran like a terror to my heart, the sense, The shivering delight upon my skin, Of her lips touching me.) My beloved,— It may be it were wise, that ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... stunt of Tintinnabula and the Camelopard!" said Gerald. "That is the Black Shore yonder, and the noise is that of the Tree-browser's fiddle, in sooth a goodly noise. Approach we along the moonglade! that is what we call the wake ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... successful deer-hunt had taken place, and the fiddle had, as Bryan expressed it, been "sarved out" to the men, for the purpose of rejoicing their hearts with sweet sounds. On that day a small band of Indians had arrived with a rich and unusually large ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... be due to a spectre, or mare, which they called the "wood mare." The Water [51] Betony is said to make one of the ingredients in Count Mattaei's noted remedy, "anti-scrofuloso." The Figwort is named in Somersetshire "crowdy-kit" (the word kit meaning a fiddle), "or fiddlewood," because if two of the stalks are rubbed together, they make a noise like the scraping of the bow on violin strings. In Devonshire, also, the ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... spitcat sate on a garden gate And a snapdog fared beneath; Careless and free was his mien, and he Held a fiddle-string in his teeth. ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... a row-boat up Loch Katrine, though both on that and Loch Lomond you may go in a hateful little steamer with a squeaking fiddle to play Rob Roy MacGregor O. I walked almost all the way through the pass from Loch Katrine to Loch Lomond; it was a distance of six miles; but you feel as if you could walk sixty in that pure, exhilarating ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... that direct appeal in Paris," he thought. "It's British. Come, I am going to sleep, I must wake up, I must aim higher—aim higher," cried the little artist to himself. All through his tea and afterward, as he was giving his eldest boy a lesson on the fiddle, his mind dwelt no longer on his troubles, but he was rapt into the better land; and no sooner was he at liberty than he hastened with positive exhilaration ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they simply went on with their ordinary tasks and amusements as if nothing personal had happened. Before these two gentlemen retired, however, they had to take part in a dance in the coach-house, at which old Styles played the fiddle, and the constable called out the figures, while Mr. Pilgrim groaned in the ears of Mrs. Hill over the worldly spirit that was sapping the foundations of spiritual life. When the drawing-room people left ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... he had failed in his attempts at speaking grammatically, and with a sudden determination never again to try, he precipitately left the house, and for the next two hours amused himself by playing "Bruce's Address" upon his old cracked fiddle. From that time Sal gave up all hopes of educating Uncle Peter, and confined herself mostly to literary efforts, of which we shall ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... wish to speak about that now. I take this figure of a man who so contentedly and continually took such a subordinate place—played second fiddle quite willingly all his days, and who toiled on without any notice or record, and ask whether it does not teach one ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... is called, by some people, watering. Now it happened that a certain man named PYKE did build him a costly mansion on the street which is called Twenty-third, and did therein have foreign singers and dancers, and players upon the violin, which is called the fiddle, and upon the bass viol, which is called the big fiddle, and upon sheets of parchment, which are called the drum, and upon divers other instruments. And PHYSKE looked upon the mansion, and it seemed good in his eyes, and he said unto ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 25, September 17, 1870 • Various
... that once, said Sir Aymeris, I should bid them disobey their lady. Said Birdalone: And how if they disobeyed thee, and obeyed me? Quoth Sir Aymeris: If they bring thee back safe, they may chance to sing to the twiggen fiddle-bow, that they may be warned from such folly; but if they come back without thee, by All-hallows the wind of wrath shall sweep ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... this child is that of every man! What difficulties in the pursuit of his desires! what inanity in the possession of most, and satiety in those which seem more real and substantial! The delights of most men are as childish and as superficial as that of my little girl; a feather or a fiddle are their pursuits and their pleasures through life, even to their ripest years, if such men may be said to attain any ripeness at all. But let us survey those whose understandings are of a more elevated and refined temper; how empty ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... dance, and here I became useful, being able to play Scotch reels and Irish jigs on the fiddle. Then we had songs and yarns again. Some could tell of furious fights with whales that made our blood boil; others could talk of the green fields at home, until we almost fancied we were boys again; and some could not tell stories at all. They had little ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... "Oh, fiddle-de-fudge, Roger! I'm not interfering, and it is my affair. Mona is my affair, and so are you; and now your Aunt Patty is going ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... mannerliness will not let him feed, and he is sharp set at an argument when he should cut his meat. He is discarded for a gamester at all games but one and thirty[41], and at tables he reaches not beyond doublets. His fingers are not long and drawn out to handle a fiddle, but his fist clunched with the habit of disputing. He ascends a horse somewhat sinisterly, though not on the left side, and they both go jogging in grief together. He is exceedingly censured by the inns-of-court men, for that heinous vice, being out of fashion. He cannot ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... "Rock-a-by-Lady," by Eugene Field; to Houghton Mifflin Company for permission to adapt selections from Hiawatha; to Doubleday, Page & Company for "The Sand Man," by Margaret Vandergrift, from The Posy Ring—Wiggin and Smith; to James A. Honey for "The Monkey's Fiddle," from South African Tales; to Maud Barnard for "Donal and Conal"; to Maud Barnard and Emilie Yonker for ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... the strings of the old fiddle will tighten up a good deal, if I abstain from attempting to play upon the instrument at present—but that a few jigs now will ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... department well enough, but by doing every department too well. As child, cockney, pirate, or Puritan, his disguises were so good that most people could not see the same man under all. It is an unjust fact that if a man can play the fiddle, give legal opinions, and black boots just tolerably, he is called an Admirable Crichton, but if he does all three thoroughly well, he is apt to be regarded, in the several departments, as a common fiddler, a common lawyer, and a common boot-black. This is what has ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... just remembered. It is like that in this life. You wake up, feeling as fit as a fiddle; you look at the window and see the sun, and thank Heaven for a fine day; you begin to plan a perfectly corking luncheon party with some of the chappies you met last night at the National ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... find me food and drink. Cakes and fruit there! Nothing of the sort. Stones, painted stones! And those other things! Bottles they call them— bottles and decanters. All a deception. They're imps—some demigods! See how they dance. Let's join them! Come, old Zanzibar! Bring your fiddle! And my Bornean beauties, come you. We'll have a grand fandango. We'll make a dancing room of the Condor's deck, and kick up our heels high as the cuddy head. That's the way we'll ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... to the whizbangs concert party last night. It was A1—one chap makes his fiddle absolutely speak. He played that Volunteer Organist and parts of Henry VIII., the basso sang 'Will o' the Wisp,' and most of the other songs were old 'uns. I tell you, you wouldn't believe we had such things a couple ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... there was a sharp, scraping sound. The silk, which had been strained like a fiddle-string over a bridge, parted on the edge of the keen knife, and, as Joe's arms dropped quite nerveless and inert, down went the knife, and Gwyn felt ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... sick!" cried Smallbones. "My sister in Iowa has got a fiddle; an' I know she plays five toons on it—I've heerd her. She's got a mouth organ, too, an' a musical-box—electric! One 'ud think nobody had got nuthin' but Will Henderson." He strode back to the bar in dudgeon, filled to the brim with ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... great use, and the people are astonished to hear me speak French, Italian, German, Russian, and occasionally Gypsy. I have already met with several Gypsies; those who live abroad in the wildernesses are quite black; the more civilised wander about as musicians, playing on the fiddle, at which they are very expert, they speak the same languages as those in England, with slight variations, and upon the whole they understand me very well. Amongst other places I have been to Tokay, where I drank some of ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... sword-stroke with both his hands, so that his head fell quickly beneath the table to the ground. A piteous meed it was, which he meted out to the master. Hagen then spied a gleeman sitting at King Etzel's board. In his wrath he hied him thither and struck off his right hand upon the fiddle. "Take this as message to the ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... never is," laughed his friend. "But she's a right smart filly; she looks much the best of the lot. Dixon's got her as fit as a fiddle string. When you're done with that man you might turn him over to ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... isn't right to neglect the boy that's come to do a day's work with you. (Going to the door) Many's the day I put in with the scythe in Ireland, and in England too; I did more than stroll with the fiddle, and I saw more places than where fiddling brought me. (Brian MacConnell comes to the door) I was just going out to you, Brian. I was telling the girl here that it's not right to neglect the boy that's giving you a day's work out of ...
— Three Plays • Padraic Colum
... neither splayed nor in-toed, and to set their feet down with a gentle forward pressure, rather like the Australian's stealthy footfall. Talking among themselves, or waiting for friends, they did not drum with their fingers, fiddle with their feet, or feel the hair on their faces. These things seem trivial enough, but when breeds are in the making everything is worth while. A man told me once—but I never tried the experiment—that each of our Four Races ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... by ill luck of any kind. When they halted for the midday meal it was like a great picnic in the soft warm sunshine, and when evening came the Jayhawkers rollicked around their fires or gathered where one of their number had tuned up his fiddle. William Isham was his name, a great bearded fellow who hailed originally from Rochester, New York; he would sit by the hour on the tongue of his wagon playing "Oh Susannah" and other lively airs, or strike up a jig tune while Negro Joe, who ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... the middle, with Esther and Mellicent hanging on an arm at either side. Robert was her sworn vassal, and Max and Oswald her respectful and, on the whole, obedient servants. Altogether, the prospect of playing second fiddle to this strange girl was by no means pleasant. Peggy tilted her chin, and spoke in ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... Oriental origin as their counterparts can still be seen amongst the Kabyles of Northern Africa): the first being a fife (siscariello); the second a tin globe covered with skin pierced by a piece of cane (puti-puti); the third a wooden saw and a split stick, making a primitive bow and fiddle (scetavaiasse); the fourth an arrangement of three wooden mallets, that are rattled together like a gigantic pair of bones (tricca-ballache); and the fifth a Jew's harp (scaccia-pensieri). A tarantella danced to the ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... you can tell me, Tony, but 'tis such an easy way to get a living; I could enjoy such glorious indolence; could fish, and hunt, and shoot, and play the fiddle, and attend feasts and merry-makings, with such a happy consciousness of being found in the path of duty, that it would give a double zest to enjoyment. Now don't be envious, my dear demure cousin, and forestall me in my project. I am sure to gain my father's consent. It will save him so much ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... step, the ground leg only being bent, to give their strides the greater force. After the men had all started, the captains of companies followed, even more fantastically dressed; and last of all came the great Colonel Congow, a perfect Robinson Crusoe, with his long white-haired goat-skins, a fiddle-shaped leather shield, tufted with white hair at all six extremities, bands of long hair tied below the knees, and a magnificent helmet, covered with rich beads of every colour, in excellent taste, surmounted with a ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... resist the rollicking music back of the paying booth. Three sable musicians form the orchestra, and from a bass viol, fiddle and fife they extract melody that, with all its short-coming, would make a deacon wish to dance. Any one, white or black, can purchase the privilege of keeping step to the music for two cents, or one strawberry ticket. Business was superb, and every shade of color and character was represented. ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... was always as hard as a nail, it was seldom that there was anything amiss with him; but at last the drink began to tell, and he woke one morning with his hands shaking and all his nerves tingling like over-stretched fiddle-strings. He had been dining at some very wet house the night before, and the wine had, perhaps, been more plentiful than choice; at any rate, there he was, with a tongue like a bath towel and a head that ticked like an eight-day clock. ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... band struck up again to a lively tune, his Lordship playing the first Fiddle; and the whole scene terminated in the most humorous and satisfactory manner for all parties—except, perhaps, the prisoner—who was duly committed for trial to the next sittings of the Central Criminal Court, which were to take ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... squeaking and bag-pipes droning as if they never would stop. The crazy throng shouted amidst the din; the noise still rings in my ears. There was no end to the games and dancing. The lads tossed their brown, blue and red-stockinged legs in the air, just as the fiddle played—the coat-tails flew and, holding a girl clasped in the right arm and a mug of beer high over their heads till the foam spattered, the throng of men whirled round and round. There was as much screaming and rejoicing as if every ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is acted no Music whatever is allowed, not a fiddle prefaced the performance; but at seven o'clock the curtain slowly rose, and amidst the thunder of applause, succeeded by a breathless silence, Talma stepped forth in the Roman toga of Manlius. His figure is bad, short, and rather clumsy, his countenance ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... is pleased to be mad, I should be very sorry to be found right in my senses. Timothy Crabshaw will never eat the bread of unthankfulness—it shall never be said of him, that he was wiser than his measter. As for the matter of following a madman, we may see your honour's face is made of a fiddle; every one that looks on you, loves you." This compliment the knight returned, by saying, "If my face is a fiddle, Crabshaw, your tongue is a fiddlestick that plays upon it—yet your music is very disagreeable—you don't keep time." ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... at the congress of Welsh fairies, was the most comical of any in the company. The saying that he was popular with all the mountain spirits was shown to be true, the moment he began to scrape his fiddle, for then they all crowded ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... line of rope, now taut, and resembling a huge "fiddle string," as Bandy-legs remarked, testing it as he passed along. It led them to the brow of an abrupt little descent, a sheer drop of perhaps twenty feet. Down this slope they followed the rope with their eyes and then discovered it ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... she sighs—'weep away her grief within lonely walls; no one will trouble himself about her tears,—empty and dead is my future,—but I shall still now and then take a smell at the withered nosegay of the past'—No wonder that before she reaches this awful climax, Ferdinand smashes the fiddle and bursts ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... From his station behind the long counter, which was made of four heavy planks supported on barrels at either end, he had poured strange mixtures into beer mugs and exchanged them for good government coin. When he was not performing his part as bartender, he was scraping illy timed tunes upon a fiddle. ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... to-night! I want to have a lot of just such concerts so we mustn't put the prima donna out of condition. But I've a little girl here with a fiddle and I tell you she can just make it talk! Come farther forward, Dolly dear, and stand close to me. Then 'rosin your bow' and get to work. Show these cowboys what a little girl-tenderfoot can do. Maybe, too, who knows? Maybe our Jim ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... my dreaming. From the mufflers in which his father, the mountebank, has wrapped the child, to carry him across the heath, a little tumbling-boy emerges in soiled tights. He is half asleep. His father scrapes the fiddle. The boy shortens his red belt, kisses his fingers to us, and ties himself into a knot among ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... mind to think of both countries, and every time I have left France it has been with more admiration of that lively land; {171} but Frenchmen, during this visit, looked at by us for the twentieth time, had evident signs of wounded vanity: they were conscious of playing second fiddle in a ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... gentleman. But no words could do justice to the conditions of life on Samburan. A desert island was nothing to it. Moreover, when you were cast away on a desert island—why, you could not help yourself; but to expect a fiddle-playing girl out of an ambulant ladies' orchestra to remain content there for a day, for one single day, was inconceivable. She would be frightened at the first sight of it. She ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... compliments by the high Lodge-gate in the split-oak park palings and they stood still; even Stalky, who had played second, not to say a dumb, fiddle, regarding McTurk as one from another world. The two glasses of strong home-brewed had brought a melancholy upon the boy, for, slowly strolling with his hands in his pockets, he crooned:—"Oh, Paddy dear, and did ye hear the news that's ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... Afghanistan is an extremely poor, landlocked country, highly dependent on farming (wheat especially) and livestock raising (sheep and goats). Economic considerations have played second fiddle to political and military upheavals during more than 16 years of war, including the nearly 10-year Soviet military occupation (which ended 15 February 1989). Over the past decade, one-third of the population ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... says that she reminded him of the pictures of the royal yacht in which Queen Victoria came to Ireland to open Kingstown harbour at the very beginning of her reign. She was a paddle steamer. She had an exaggerated form of fiddle bow, a long bowsprit and two tall masts on which sails ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... his fiddle along, and those were wonderful tunes he drew from the strings. Sometimes he explained what they meant, his words running along in monotone that yet kept time ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... 'Oh, fiddle!' replied Facey, 'Jack Weatherley slept in it for months, and he's half a hand higher than you—sixteen hands, if he's an inch.' And Sponge jerked his head and bit his lips, thinking he was 'done' ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... either all married to some body else, or run quite away; so that I am resolv'd if this same Lucretia proves not right, I'll e'en forswear this Town and all their false Wares, amongst which, zoz, I believe they vent as many false Wives as any Metropolitan in Christendom, I'll say that for't, and a Fiddle for't, i'faith:—come give me my Watch out,—so, my Diamond Rings too: so, I think I shall appear pretty well all together, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... never speak till you are spoken to."' Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 20, 1773. Boswell writing of this Tour said:—'I also may be allowed to claim some merit in leading the conversation; I do not mean leading, as in an orchestra, by playing the first fiddle; but leading as one does in examining a witness—starting topics, and making him pursue them.' Ib. Sept. 28. One day he recorded:—'I did not exert myself to get Dr. Johnson to talk, that I might not have the labour of writing ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... drivers who manned this fleet on wheels were men of a type that finds no parallel except in the boatmen on the western rivers who were almost their contemporaries. Fit for the severest toil, weathered to the color of the red man, at home under any roof that harbored a demijohn and a fiddle, these hardy nomads of early commerce were the custodians of the largest amount of traffic ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... white, and blue, and usually accompanied by a tableau arrangement on a cart. Every twenty yards they stopped, went through a series of antics, supposed to be country dances, to the tune of the cornet and a fiddle, and then brought round the hat, frequently embracing any woman who ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... {66} and at the entrance into the wood, he dismissed him and his attendants, though much against their will, and proceeded on his journey unarmed; from too great a presumption of security, preceded only by a minstrel and a singer, one accompanying the other on the fiddle. The Welsh awaiting his arrival, with Iorwerth, brother of Morgan of Caerleon, at their head, and others of his family, rushed upon him unawares from the thickets, and killed him and many of his followers. Thus it appears how incautious ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... of pigeons which frequented the lonely groves on the river-side, made vocal the world of air; flocks of wild ducks, or geese, went whirring down the long spaces of water between the trees on either bank; and some one with a fiddle or a concertina made musical the evening, while the singing voices of rough habitants rang through ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... characters. And these settled the business, for I recognised them as a kind of bed-hanging, popular with the commoner class of the Chinese. Nor were further evidences wanting, such as night-clothes of an extraordinary design, a three-stringed Chinese fiddle, a silk handkerchief full of roots and herbs, and a neat apparatus for smoking opium, with a liberal provision of the drug. Plainly, then, the cook had been a Chinaman; and, if so, who was Jos. Amalu? Or had Jos. stolen ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... voices through the house, as Miss Nancy entered, mingled with the scrape of a fiddle preluding in the kitchen; but the Lammeters were guests whose arrival had evidently been thought of so much that it had been watched for from the windows, for Mrs. Kimble, who did the honours at the Red House on these great ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... you are looking as fit as a fiddle!" he cried. "Where have you been, and what have you been doing ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him—why, certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... had been able to pay his way through Cambridge University by the scholarships and prizes which he had won. One beautiful little dark-eyed daughter of seven was playing in a West End Theatre as the dormouse in "Alice in Wonderland." She was second fiddle to Alice herself, also, and could sing all her songs. Her pay was some five pounds a week, poor enough for the attraction she proved, but more than all the rest of the family put together earned. At that time I never went to ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... "Please don't fiddle with those candlesticks. They're the rarest American workmanship, and if you were to break one of them Aunt Marion would kill me. I'll feel safer about you if you ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... purpose because of its size. Early next morning the festivities began. Commissary whisky was provided in abundance. "Sport" (William Harris) furnished music for the occasion, which he extracted from an old fiddle procured from some unexplainable source. The ball opened with a good pull all around from the canteen. Ordinary forms of entertainment and social enjoyment soon became stale and they concluded to try the mazy ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... chambers. In other respects, he was one of the wits of the place, read Ovid and Martial, aimed at quick repartee and pun, (often very far fetched,) danced, fenced, played at tennis, and performed sundry tunes on the fiddle and French horn, to the great annoyance of old Counsellor Barratter, who lived in the chambers immediately below him. Such was Reginald Lowes-toffe, shrewd, alert, and well-acquainted with the town through all its recesses, but in a sort of disrespectable way. This gallant, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... put on this suit an' a pair o' red-pointed slippers, light his pipe, pick his guitar, an' saw his fiddle till along toward mornin', all the while singin' little batches o' song an' speakin' pieces. Then he'd heave a sigh an' lay down alongside o' me; but in about fifteen minutes he'd jump out o' bed, sayin', "That's good! That's great! ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... gotter wait a hull hour pas' her breckfus time jist kase Madam Fussa-ma-fiddle ain't choose fer ter git up? I bait yo' she git up when she ter home, and I bait yo' she ain't gitting somebody ter dress her, an' wait on her han' an' foot like Mandy done been a-doin' sense yistiddy; ner she ain' been keepin' ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... talent for recording gossip, or the Anecdotes would have been a much more racy book. Spence was certainly an amiable, but I think a very weak man; and it appears to me that his learning has been overrated. He might indeed have been well designated as "a fiddle-faddle ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 25. Saturday, April 20, 1850 • Various
... making sleds after the manner of the country. They are made of a single plank turned up at one end like a fiddle head, and the baggage is lashed on in bags and sacks. Two other Indians arrived from the ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... out one yell, for the pain about his chest—then made no further sound. The rawhide rope was like a fiddle-string. It seemed absurd that an anchor so small, so limber, in the sand, could hold so hard against the horse. Van urged a greater strain. He knew that the rope would hold. He did not know how much the man could bear before something awful might occur. There ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... Villa in Mexico; and the instant the European conflict started, Freyberg realised that he might do better in Europe. He therefore deserted Villa, and set out afoot for San Francisco. His splendid constitution stood him in good stead, and he arrived there as fit as a fiddle, soon afterwards winning enough money in a swimming race to take him to London. In the English capital he received a commission as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Division, and his ...
— Some Naval Yarns • Mordaunt Hall
... contribute much to this. I did not even correct proof-sheets; nay, could not, for I have cancelled two sheets, instante Jacobo, and I myself being of his opinion; for, as I said yesterday, we must and will take pains. The fiddle-faddle of arranging all the things was troublesome, but they give a good account of my affairs. The money for the necessary payments is ready, and therefore there is a sort of pleasure which does not arise out of any mean source, since it has for its object the prospect ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... other respects as a man could be. He was a very merry fellow, full of jokes, and if any one told a story which was at all verging on the marvelous, he was sure to tell another which would be still more incredible. He played the fiddle and sang to his own accompaniments, which were very droll, as he extracted very strange noises from his instrument. Sometimes his bow would be on the wrong side of the bridge, sometimes down at the keys; besides which he produced sounds by thumping the fiddle as well ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... counts and all the little countesses her sisters. Counts! every one of these wretches says he is a count. Guiscard, that stabbed Mr. Harvy, said he was a count; and I believe he was a barber. All Frenchmen are barbers—Fiddle-dee! don't contradict me—or else dancing-masters, or else priests;" and ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Then there was his wife, and the slip of a girl who bowled over Blake there, and half a dozen ragged brats; and a fellow on a tramp, not a gipsy—some runaway apprentice, I take it, but a jolly dog—with no luggage but an old fiddle on which he scraped away uncommonly well, and set Blake making rhymes as we sat in the tent. You never heard any of his songs. Here's one for each of us; we're going to get up the characters and sing them about the country;—now for a ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... can whistle like a bird,—he can whistle like a whole band," answered Kinney, warming. "And of course the Kanucks can fiddle." ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... to him. A ten years' widower, without issue, he was the most eligible and most pathetically sought-after marriageable man in all Hawaii. A clean-and-strong-featured brunette, tall, slenderly graceful, with the lean runner's stomach, always fit as a fiddle, a distinguished figure in any group, the greying of hair over his temples (in juxtaposition to his young- textured skin and bright vital eyes) made him appear even more distinguished. Despite the social ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... eyes and he looked even more self-confident and determined. Marian leaned back in my arms to look into my eyes. "Steve," she cried, "it's simply got to work!" Gloria Farrow merely said, "He'll have to have medication, of course," and went briskly to a wall cabinet and began to fiddle with medical tools. Howard Macklin and Jonas Harrison went into a deep telepathic conference that was interrupted only when Jonas Harrison turned to Phillip to say, "You'll have to provide us with ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... assuming a tone of voice as different from the former as fiddle from violin, and with a particular eye to our hero, where he still kept his seat on his charger's back, or rather was kept there by the unlocked arms of Manitou-Echo, ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... were lulled to sleep by ditties that told of Jack Sprat and his accommodating wife (an instance of the harmony in which those of opposite tastes may live in the bonds of wedlock); of Jack, the bachelor who lived harmoniously with his fiddle, and had a soul above the advice of his utilitarian friend; of Jack who, like Caliban, was to have a new master; of Jack[1] the brother of Gill; and of the Jack who was only remarkable for having a brother, whose name, as a younger son, is not thought worthy of mention. And were not our waking ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... that you can make lovely rhymes; you would be a find for our fiddlers here; they fiddle so beautifully that they can't help weeping over it themselves. Would God our Rechenmeister girl could hear them, she would cry too. At your bidding I will again lay aside my anger and bear myself even more bravely ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... a new string for my fiddle, And call to the neighbours to come, And partners shall dance down the middle Until the old pewter-wares hum: And we'll sip the ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... It is like that in this life. You wake up, feeling as fit as a fiddle; you look at the window and see the sun, and thank Heaven for a fine day; you begin to plan a perfectly corking luncheon party with some of the chappies you met last night at the National Sporting ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... carved misereres, making a larger collection than any other in the country. The subjects range from a horrible representation of the devil with a second face in the middle of his body to humorous pictures of a cat playing a fiddle, and a scold on her way to the ducking-stool in a wheel-barrow, gripping with one hand the ear of the man who ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... the Christmas week, from the day after Christmas until the day after New-year, is the negroes' saturnalia! There are usually eight days of incessant dancing, feasting and frolicking from quarter to quarter, and from barn to barn. Then the banjo, the fiddle and the "bones" are heard from morning until night, and ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... food and drink. Cakes and fruit there! Nothing of the sort. Stones, painted stones! And those other things! Bottles they call them— bottles and decanters. All a deception. They're imps—some demigods! See how they dance. Let's join them! Come, old Zanzibar! Bring your fiddle! And my Bornean beauties, come you. We'll have a grand fandango. We'll make a dancing room of the Condor's deck, and kick up our heels high as the cuddy head. That's the way we'll do it. Ha— ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... the patio; the town on the American side was fast asleep; the wind with the smell of sagebrush stirred a clump of bamboo. The desert night had him—and when he rode away toward the Mexican line he had forgotten his gun and taken his fiddle. ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... impatiently. "I only hope that his notice will not discourage you for Tristan to-morrow night. But Mr. Calcraft is really a kind man, even if he seems severe in print. I tell him that he always hangs his fiddle outside the door, as the Irish say, which means, my dear Herr Viznina, that he is kinder abroad than at home." Seeing the slightly bewildered look of her companion she added, "And so you didn't mind his being cross this morning, did you?" The ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... positive right and wrong, which are facts, not ideas. I believe that there is good and evil, that the one is at war with the other always; and that good can do no evil, evil no good. I've got beyond all the dogma and fiddle-faddle of the intellect with which the church has overlaid the spirit, and all the ceremonial so useful and necessary for individual souls in early stages of development. I used to think if I could ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... winter day, eighty years ago," began the Story Girl without further parley, "Donald Fraser was sitting by the window of his new house, playing his fiddle for company, and looking out over the white, frozen bay before his door. It was bitter, bitter cold, and a storm was brewing. But, storm, or no storm, Donald meant to go over the bay that evening to see Nancy Sherman. He was thinking of her as he played 'Annie Laurie,' for Nancy was ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... my heart is a fiddle; the strings are rozend with ioy that my other young Mr. is come home, & my tongue the sticke ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... atter her with a knife. Reckon you ricolleck Bud Thomas," he went on without a change of countenance. "He made a fiddle outen a gourd an' could play on it a right sharp. Went along by the sto' one day an' he war a settin' on a box with this here gourd ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... the doctor says. He's a flapdoodle; nothing but a kind of a sort of a pain. It's all gone now. I'm as fit as a fiddle—and I've got eleven dollars. Let's go somewhere and ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... melt the belly out of my fiddle," said Johnny Mears to his wife, who sat on a three-legged stool by the rough table in the little whitewashed "end-room", putting a patch of patches over the seat of a pair of moleskin knickerbockers. ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... gently with the dead. James Devlin, where are you old man, Whose fingers o'er the catgut ran? Professor of the art to foil Both "treason, stratagem and spoil," In days which now are but a riddle, When William Murphy played the fiddle So merrily, long, long ago, To trip of "light fantastic toe." Fond were you of the rod and line When sport and profit did combine In other days, when mighty Bass And Pickerel lay upon the grass Beside you, as with practised hand, You hauled the scaly kings to land Night-lines and gill-nets, may ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... well pleased, though the design is really a wonder of depravity. Polished granite columns of amazing thickness, with carved capitals of stupendous weight, all made to give shop-room for an apple-woman, or a convenient platform for a suicide. The parapet is a fiddle-faddle of pretty cast-iron arcading, out of scale with the columns, incongruous with the capitals, and quite unsuited for a work that should be simply grand in its usefulness; and at each corner of the bridge ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... breath, and arranged his coat. The quiet little man, who had just muscle enough to lift a dictionary from the shelf, and just training enough to play the fiddle, so far from being daunted by the rough reception accorded to him, appeared to feel no other sentiment in relation to it than a sentiment of ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... to play the fiddle a great deal, and have played for Lincoln a number of times. He used to come over to where I was boarding and ask me to play the fiddle for him; and I would take it with me when I went over to visit him, and when he grew weary of telling stories he would ask me ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... Life in England." Mr. Elwin and his wife were a most delightful couple, models of old-fashioned courtesy and heart-kindness. He knew Borrow well, and quite discredited the innuendoes and insinuations of many Norwich folk about him. It was a joke with the Murray circle that "big Borrow was second fiddle at his home, and there is ample testimony that his wife was a capable manager and looked after his affairs, literary as well as domestic." Though Borrow boasted of his proficiency in the Norfolk dialect, Mr. Elwin told him that he had not cultivated it with his ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... the foremost of the Host were gotten so far forward that the men of the Face could begin to move, lo! there was Redesman with his fiddle amongst the leaders; and he had done a man's work in the day of battle, and all looked kindly on him. About him on this morn were some who had learned the craft of singing well together, and knew his minstrelsy, and he ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... interest. It was rather larger than the usual living-room in a mountain home, but it had not much else to distinguish it. The furniture was of the kind to be purchased in the near-by town, and the walls were roughly ceiled with cypress boards; but a few magazines, some books on a rude shelf, a fiddle-box under the table, and a guitar hanging on a nail gave evidence of refinement and taste and spoke to him of pleasures which he had only known afar. The guitar especially engaged his attention. "I wonder if she sings?" he ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... be woe indeed, lords; the sly whoresons Have got a speeding trick to lay down ladies. A French song and a fiddle has no fellow. ...
— The Life of Henry VIII • William Shakespeare [Dunlap edition]
... out with the desert column? He was a regular Christmas-tree of contraptions when he took the field in full fig, with his water-bottle, lanyard, revolver, writing-case, housewife, gig-lamps, and the Lord knows what all. He used to fiddle about with 'em and show us how they worked; but he never seemed to do much except fudge his reports from the ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... was laundered by the mysteries of twilight. Living groups lay peacefully about the river bottom, gambling, Torrance knew. For the moment the orchestra was resting. But snatches of hideous sound came wafting on the evening air as music; concertina, fiddle, mouth-organ, with here and there a cornet, a mandolin, a guitar, many breathing individual melody, merged into one vast harmony. Rasping voices lifted themselves in song. No laughter, no shouting—only the sounds of men whose memories are more sensitive than their ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... the profound truth conveyed by this finale, at the instant when the composer delivers his last note and the author his last line, when the orchestra gives the last pull at the fiddle-bow and the last puff at the bassoon, when the principal singers say "Let's go to supper!" and the chorus people exclaim "How lucky, it doesn't rain!" Well, in every condition in life, as in an Italian opera, there comes a time when the joke is over, when the trick is done, when people must ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... but grinned like the head of an old fiddle. Mr. Gibney appeared to swell visibly, after the manner of a ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... account of its remarkable view is the Cat and Fiddle Inn, on the Macclesfield Road, 5 miles ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... know, though," he said, directly after. "If Bob were here, he would not like to knuckle under and play second fiddle. Well, I shouldn't either. Perhaps it's best is it is, I'm captain, and can do as I like, only it isn't always nice to do as one likes, and I often feel as if it would be much nicer to have some one to ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... elevating to a still higher pitch the stentorian diapason of his voice, "I am Picot (Nepomucene), but I have not discovered a star; I don't concern myself with any such fiddle-faddle; besides, my eyes are very weak; and that insolent young fellow I have come here to find is making me ridiculous with such talk. I don't see him here; he is hiding himself, I know; he dares not look ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... Sat the Parliament-house, To hatch the royal gull; After much fiddle-faddle The egg proved addle, And Oliver came ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... are assuming the shape of elongated O's—an epidemic that has extended to the Wall-flowers; the "harp" has accompanied his instrument with fitful snores; the "violin" scarcely knows the back from the front of his fiddle, or the "cornet" which end to blow into;—yet, upon being asked for "Roger de Coverley," they make a desperate effort to awake, for they know it to be the last dance—which is supported by the whole strength of the company,—Captain de Camp leading off with ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... their daughters and sharing their power. At one of the Tonga islands, a scamp of a Welshman officiated as cupbearer to the king of the cannibals. The monarch of the Sandwich islands has three foreigners about his court—a Negro to beat the drum, a wooden-legged Portuguese to play the fiddle, and Mordecai, a juggler, to amuse his majesty with cups and balls and sleight of hand. On the Marquesan island of Hivarhoo, they had found an English sailor who had attained to the highest dignity in the country. He had deserted from a merchant ship, and at once set up, on his own hook, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... and Peace Seem'd to smile at the sound of the fiddle, Proud to fill up each tall shining space Round the lanthorn[1] that stood in the middle. And GEORGE'S head too; Heav'n screen him! May he finish in peace his long reign! And what did we when we had seen him? Why—went ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... any confounded sentiment. Here's your wedding at hand, and here's a long-lost intimate friend about to turn up in the midst of it. You'd very much prefer him to stay away; there's nothing to be ashamed of in that. I should myself if I were in your shoes. No fellow cares about playing second fiddle at his own wedding. Now, I've got a little suggestion to make. I was going down to Wastwater to-morrow, but I wouldn't much mind waiting another day if I could only get a fellow to come with me. I always liked Holroyd, you know—capital good chap he is, and if you leave me to manage ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... took its name, Few critics can unriddle: Some say from 'pastrycook' it came, And some, from 'cat' and 'fiddle.' ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... chanced to see a light shining through a crevice in the rocks. Creeping cautiously forward and peering through the opening, he observed the formidable thief sitting on the floor, amusing himself with an old fiddle ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... her mind now, and finds it hard to keep up with others and at the same time out of debt, she has the right to hope that by and by she will be so good an actress, and so valuable to the theatre, that a fat salary will make the clothes matter play second fiddle, as is right and proper it should, to the question of ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... to hear you speak, and sorry I come at an inconvenient time, when you were busy with your music; and—let me see— didn't Mr Mark say something about your wanting the cash to buy a new pianner? Or was it an old fiddle? I quite forget, ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... the 'Magic Fiddle,'" said Nora, with a reminiscent chuckle. "I used to keep a copy of Grimms' Fairy Tales in my desk at school, just for that story. It always made me giggle. I could fairly see all those poor people dancing whether they wished to dance or not. Ask Hippy what his ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... charm, the "Orlando Innamorato" of poor Ferrarese Boiardo. Moreover, Ariosto has many qualities unknown to Boiardo; wit, malice, stateliness, decided eloquence and power of simile and apostrophe; he is a symphony for full orchestra, and Boiardo a mere melody played on a single fiddle, which good authorities (and no one dare contest with Italians when they condemn anything not Tuscan as jargon) pronounce to be no Cremona. All these advantages Ariosto certainly has; and I do not quarrel with those who ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... Dutch part of the Italian genius. I have only to add a word of advice to the painters, that, however excellent they may be in painting naturally, they would not flatter themselves very much upon it, and to the connoisseurs, that when they see a cat or fiddle painted so finely, that, as the phrase is, "it looks as if you could take it up," they would not for that reason immediately compare the painter to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... like good Father Philip, in the romance of "The Monastery," they seemed utterly unable to change their tune. "Cherry ripe!" "Cherry ripe!" was the universal cry of all the idle in the town. Every unmelodious voice gave utterance to it; every crazy fiddle, every cracked flute, every wheezy pipe, every street organ was heard in the same strain, until studious and quiet men stopped their ears in desperation, or fled miles away into the fields or woodlands, to be at peace. This plague lasted for a twelvemonth, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Fiddle, or fence, or mace, or mack; Or moskeneer, or flash the drag; Dead-lurk a crib, or do a crack; Pad with a slang, or chuck a fag; Bonnet, or tout, or mump and gag; Rattle the tats, or mark the spot You cannot bank a single stag: Booze and the blowens ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... happiness that he thought he should never be tired of a life where there was so much music and dancing, to which he had been always addicted; and, as he phrased it himself, he thought he was in another world when he got with a set of men and maids in a barn with a fiddle among them. ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... evening. She treated the suitors for the pleasure of the next set with becoming ease and suavity of manner; she knew her worth, and managed accordingly. When the favoured gallant stood by her side waiting for the rudely scraped tune from a screeching fiddle, satisfaction, joy, and triumph over his rivals were pictured on ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... that there is a catgut in a fiddle. No fiddle without catgut—no music without cats. Don't talk to me about soul ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... out carousin' with that fiddle of his'n—down ter Lem Parraday's tavern this very night with some wild gang of fellers, and my 'Rill hum with that child o' his'n. And what d'ye think?" demanded Mrs. Scattergood, still excitedly. "What d'ye think's ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... ran himself into debt because he bought so many and such good ones. Once, when visiting his father's house at Ipsden, he shocked the punctilious old gentleman by dancing on the dining-table to the accompaniment of a fiddle, which he scraped delightedly. Dancing, indeed, was another of his diversions, and, in spite of the fact that he was a fellow of Magdalen and a D.C.L. of Oxford, he was always ready to caper and to display ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... to justify the expense. Now she wished nervously that she had done as Lance Lorrigan had done, and brought musicians from Lava. Of course, there had been no piano when Lance gave his party, which was different. She herself meant to play, and Art Miller had brought his fiddle, and Jennie had volunteered to "chord" with him. But, Mary Hope felt much nervous apprehension lest these Pocatello and Lava people should think it was just Scotch stinginess ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... shrieking. There's tea or something going on downstairs. You had better come away before they have a fresh burst; they are carrying up a big fiddle." ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... little stock of flour and dried meat with them as fairly as possible and decided we would try the trail. When our plans were settled we felt in pretty good spirits again, and one of the boys got up a sort of corn-stalk fiddle which made a squeaking noise and in a little while there was a sort of mixed American and Indian dance going on in which the squaws joined in and we had a pretty jolly time till quite late at night. We were well pleased ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... ma'am, I do s'pose," answered the black. "Dey's got box wid somet'in' in him, and dey's got new kind of fiddle. Come, young man, gib Miss Dus a tune—a libely one; sich as make ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... solely from ear was a practice to be avoided if she wished her son to fulfil the promise of his babyhood. Then he had lessons at Knype, until he began to teach his teacher. Then he said he would learn the fiddle, and he did learn the fiddle; also the viola. He did not pretend to play the flute, though he could. And at school the other boys would bring him their penny or even sixpenny whistles so that he might show them of what wonderful feats a common ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... good natured, feckless lad, about eighteen or twenty years of age, and the only thing he appeared to be able to make anything of was playing the fiddle. Wherever he went his violin accompanied him. While fiddling he was happy, but it was pitiful to watch him trying to work at or take an interest in any employment which he could neither appreciate ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... of some ideas of dancing is really ludicrous. The Cambro-Britains, in a very late period, used to be played out of church by a fiddle, and to form a dance in the church-yard at the end of the service. But the ideas which the Chinese have of dancing exceeds all others. When Commodore Anson was at Canton, the officers of the Centurion had a ball upon some court holiday: while ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... part to insure the presence of Quirk's three boys. Supper over, a fresh horse was furnished me, and we set out for the dance, covering the distance in less than two hours. I knew nearly every one in the settlement, and got a cordial welcome. I played the fiddle, danced with my former sweethearts, and, ere the sun rose in the morning, rode home in time for breakfast. During that night's revelry, I contrasted my former girl friends on the San Antonio with another maiden, a slip of the old Scotch stock, transplanted and nurtured in the sunshine and soil of ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... humble thing with music in it, not a fife, not a negro-fiddle, that is not to be reverenced as much as the grandest architectural organ that ever rolled its flood-tide of harmony down a cathedral nave. For even a Jew's-harp may be so played, as to awaken all the fairies that ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... have been the most fascinating people. One Lord Maxwell of the seventeenth century, who was Roman Catholic when it wasn't safe to be Roman Catholic, used to disguise himself as a beggar, and play the fiddle in the market-place of Dumfries as a signal to tell the faithful of his own religion where and when they might come to Mass. They understood according to certain tunes agreed upon, which was easy, as they had only three meeting-places. A nice ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... makes you so fond of Lithuania! Here are we, Father Missail and I, a sinner, when we fled from the monastery, then we cared for nothing. Was it Lithuania, was it Russia, was it fiddle, was it dulcimer? All the same for us, if only there was wine. That's ...
— Boris Godunov - A Drama in Verse • Alexander Pushkin
... had no idea of playing first fiddle in any social orchestra, but was always quite satisfied to be set down for the hundred and fiftieth violin in the band, or thereabouts, is to express his modesty in very inadequate terms. He was much delighted, therefore, by ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... fellow scholars and fellow students alone could occasion. We told old stories; laughed and quaffed, and resolved, rashly perhaps, that we would hold the Club at least once a year, if possible twice. We will see how this will fudge. Our mirth was more unexpected as Sir Adam, our first fiddle, was wanting, owing to ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... the Manager sits in his chair, With a gloomy brow and dissatisfied air, And he says, as he slaps his hand on his knee, 'I'll have nothing to do with Fiddle-de-dee! ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... came after a certain miracle on May-day. The Major had taken Chad to the festival where the dance was on sawdust in the woodland—in the bottom of a little hollow, around which the seats ran as in an amphitheatre. Ready to fiddle for them stood none other than John Morgan himself, his gray eyes dancing and an arch smile on his handsome face; and, taking a place among the dancers, were Richard Hunt and—Margaret. The poised bow fell, a merry tune rang out, ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... how then? For that once, said Sir Aymeris, I should bid them disobey their lady. Said Birdalone: And how if they disobeyed thee, and obeyed me? Quoth Sir Aymeris: If they bring thee back safe, they may chance to sing to the twiggen fiddle-bow, that they may be warned from such folly; but if they come back without thee, by All-hallows the wind of wrath shall sweep their ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... perhaps a fit of coughing would come on, and the boy would grow discouraged again, but only until Hock appeared on his daily round, and plumping his sturdy person into a chair would tell all the news, and finish with, "Say, Arch, fiddle for a ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... There was a rare junketting last night at Thomas's among Sir Harry Benson's servants; he lay at Squire Walton's, but he would not suffer his servants to trouble the family: so, to be sure, they were all at Tom's, and had a fiddle, and a hot supper in the big room where the justices meet about the destroying of hares and partridges, and them things; and Tom's eyes looked so red and so bleared when I called him to get the barberries:- ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... of so many people for any length of time in the over-crowded mines was opt of the question. But that was a consideration to which the "Military Situation" could not resonably be expected to play second fiddle. ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... for the first time a fair breeze sprang up or rather lazily got up. Joyfully then we raised our mast and sail. The boys curled up to sleep, except Beaulieu. He had his fiddle and now he proceeded to favour us with 'A Life on the Ocean Wave,' 'The Campbells are Coming,' etc., in a manner worthy of his social position and of his fiddle. When not in use this aesthetic instrument (in its box) knocks about on deck or underfoot, ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... this trio is an inspired man. His fiddle is out of tune, and there is no rosin on his bow, but still he is an inspired man—the hands of the muses have been laid upon him. He plays like one possessed by a demon, by a whole horde of demons. You can feel them in the air round about him, capering frenetically; with ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... used to play the fiddle, left a girl here with child; and though I gave her two tayes in silver to bring up the child; she killed it as soon as it was born, which is a common thing in this country. The whistle and chain belonging to Mr Foster, the master ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... calamity happening to her white soul without her knowing it. If she should ever marry that man—well, it would be the old story: May and December! Noble shuddered, and the drums, the fiddles, the bass fiddle, and the saxophone seemed ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... their teeth. There were Irish harps, English harps, and Welsh harps. There was no Caledonian harp, though; but a remarkably dirty fellow in the procession seemed to be making up for the lack of one stringed instrument by bringing another,—the Scotch fiddle!—on which he perpetually played the tune of "God bless the gude Duke of Argyle!" There were harps with one, two, and three sets of strings,—harps with gold strings, silver strings, brass strings,—strings ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... greatly astonished on seeing it made into candles, and lighted in his presence; saying, that the Europeans knew every thing. Their only musical instruments are two, one of which they have from the Moors, which is like a large drum[5]; the other is somewhat like a fiddle, having only two strings, which they play on with their fingers, but gives no sounds that can ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... he heard Bower's smooth, well rounded accents through the half-open door. "Nothing I should like better," he was saying. "Are you tired? If not, bring your friend to my rooms now. Although I have been in the train all night, I am fit as a fiddle." ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... smells of the earth. They learned the ways of birds and bugs, why birds have wings, why bugs have legs, why the gladdywhingers have spotted eggs in a basket nest in a booblow tree, and why the chizzywhizzies scrape off little fiddle songs all summer long while the ...
— Rootabaga Stories • Carl Sandburg
... the stammerer, indignantly. "Ain't got no nerves. G-gr-gramma says so, and she knows. She's older 'n you, an' she's got 'em worst kind. Always gets 'em when I play the f-f-fiddle." ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... moral, and patter won't level 'em up. Wy yer might as well talk of a popgun a holding its own with a Krupp. 'Ow the brains and the ochre got fust ladled hout is a bit beyond me, But to fancy as them as has got 'em will part is dashed fiddle-de-dee. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... double-stopping upon the violin. In these the dominating influence was E flat. Spinrobin was not musical enough to describe it more accurately than this. Only, with greater skill than he knows, he mentions how Skale drew out of that fiddle the peculiarly intimate and searching tones by which strings can reach the spiritual center of a man and make him respond to delicate vibrations of ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... contracting parties were signing the document as Becky returned. The bridegroom, who halted a little on one leg, was a tall sallow man named Pesach Weingott. He was a boot-maker, who could expound the Talmud and play the fiddle, but was unable to earn a living. He was marrying Fanny Belcovitch because his parents-in-law would give him free board and lodging for a year, and because he liked her. Fanny was a plump, pulpy girl, not in the prime of youth. Her complexion was fair and ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... said, "if I ever get my hands on Halsey Innes, I shall not let go until I have told him a few things. When we get this cleared up, I am going back to the city to be quiet. One more night like the last two will end me. The peace of the country—fiddle sticks!" ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... wide level plot in the outskirts of the settlement, around which the trees spread their sheltering arms. On a plank raised on two casks sat the blacksmith with his fiddle. The carpenter sat beside him with a kettledrum, more literally a kettledrum even than the real thing, for that drum was a kettle! On a little mound that rose in the centre of the plot sat, in state, ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... bustle, uproar, and confusion; yet nothing seemed to advance: while the rage and impetuosity of the Squire continued fermenting to the highest degree of exasperation, which he signified, from time to time, by converting some newly unpacked article, such as a book, a bottle, a ham, or a fiddle, into a missile against the head of some unfortunate servant who did not seem to move in a ratio of velocity corresponding to the ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... faint, and was interrupted by gasps for breath, whereupon Roseen, still vigorously footing it, would take up the tune after a fashion of her own, her voice imitating as nearly as might be the sound of a fiddle. Overhead a lark was soaring, and his trill, wafted down to them, mingled with their quaint human music; far away over that brown and purple stretch of bog the plovers were circling, their faint melancholy call sounding every now and then. The sun would soon set, ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... to supper, an old man, with a fiddle in his hand, tottered into the garden, and down the lawn. He was a very queer-looking old man. He had long white hair, and a long ...
— The Birthday Party - A Story for Little Folks • Oliver Optic
... greater wages than a student; a lawyer get more in a day than a philosopher in a year, better reward for an hour, than a scholar for a twelvemonth's study; him that can [378]paint Thais, play on a fiddle, curl hair, &c., sooner get preferment than a philologer ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... arranging the details of the ceremony. The children were obliged, therefore, to be content with their usual game of drilling every one that they were able to muster for soldiers, after the fashion of Captain Brown's 'rifle practice,' or marching up and down the decks to the strains of Jem Butt's fiddle playing 'Tommy make room for your Uncle,' accompanied by the somewhat discordant noise of their own drums. These amusements after sunset, and scrubbing decks and working at the pumps before sunrise, give us all the much-needed exercise it is impossible ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... curbed his words. He knew that there was one appreciative ear in the mansion by the river that no amount of "dago fiddlin'" ever would charm and satisfy like his own voice with the banjo, or his little brown fiddle when it gave out the old foot-warming tunes. Mrs. Chadron was his champion in all company, and ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... worth, The manner how he sallied forth; His arms and equipage are shown; His horse's virtues, and his own. Th' adventure of the bear and fiddle Is sung, but breaks off ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... rides the rosin o'er the horse's hair! In unison their various tones to tune. Murmurs the hautboy, growls the hoarse bassoon; In soft vibration sighs the whispering lute, Tang goes the harpsichord, too-too the flute, Brays the loud trumpet, squeaks the fiddle sharp, Winds the French-horn, and twangs the tingling harp; Till, like great Jove, the leader, figuring in, Attunes to order the chaotic din. Rejected Addresses: The Theatre. H. AND ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... diddle! the cat and the fiddle; The cow jumped over the moon; The little dog laughed to see such craft, And the dish ran away ...
— Dramatic Reader for Lower Grades • Florence Holbrook
... have. I have noticed nothing else. Why, she is dressed as fine as a fiddle. She is 'taking notice.' She 'll be giving Old Caesar a successor. Then what will you do? I thought that fat darky I have seen going in at the back gate with a silk hat and a long-tailed coat looked like a preacher. You 'd better look out ...
— Mam' Lyddy's Recognition - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... Bah! I should have thought that you knew him better than that, Manutoli. To him a woman is a voice, and nothing else. If the same sounds could be got out of a flute or a fiddle he would like it much better, and think it far more convenient. I don't think my uncle Lamberto ever knew whether a woman was pretty or plain. I wish to heaven he would get caught for once in his life; it would suit my book very well. He would have less leisure ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... succeeded Southey as poet-laureate in 1843; he is emphatically the poet of external nature and of its all-inspiring power, and it is as such his admirers regard him; Carlyle compares his muse to "an honest rustic fiddle, good and well handled, but wanting two or more of the strings, and not capable of much"; to judge of Wordsworth's merits as a poet the student is referred to Matthew Arnold's ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... me a curious thing that the bow, without which the fiddle could have no being, should have received so scant attention, not alone from the community of fiddlers, but also from writers on the subject. I only know of one book in which the subject is adequately handled. Out of every twenty violinists who profess to ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... to the door when we halted and called to someone within. The fiddle played on with no faltering, but a woman came out—a gaunt and tattered woman who was yet curiously cheerful. The children lurked in her wake as she came to us and peered from beyond her while we ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... of these things let him off; and when the fateful evening came, Simon, with his beloved fiddle tucked beneath his arm for companionship, and a lantern, appeared at the inn. They wished him good luck and pleasant dreams, doubting nevertheless that he would have either; and the landlord, a kindly soul, slipped a cold snack and a jug of his ...
— The Girl Scouts' Good Turn • Edith Lavell
... brim, as some poet has observed. If I wanted to harrow you, gentlemen, I would recall to you little tables, little round tables, set out under the trees on the lawn of some country inn, where the enchanting music of harp and fiddle twangled on the summer air, where great bowls of punch chimed gently as the lumps of ice knocked on the thin crystal. The little tables were spread tinder the trees, and then, later on, perhaps, the customers were spread under the tables.—I would ask you to recall ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... I s'pect she's relieved in her mind now the bar at the hotel is closed," snapped Mrs. Scattergood. "Hopewell Drugg can't go fur astray if he don't go playin' that fiddle of his to no more o' them dances. Though you can't trust no man too fur—that's been my experience ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... child had gravely informed her that she looked like Connie and immediately taken her into his confidence regarding his aspirations toward some day playing in "a big band." He had also obligingly favored her with a solo of marvelous shrieks and squawks on his much tortured "fiddle." Mary loved children, and this, perhaps, went far toward stilling the jealousy, which, so far, only faintly stirring, bade fair to one day burst forth ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... neighborhood of Green River, when we received notice that there was to be a grand frolic at Bob Mosely's, to greet the hunters. This Bob Mosely was a prime fellow throughout the country. He was an indifferent hunter, it is true, and rather lazy to boot; but then he could play the fiddle, and that was enough to make him of consequence. There was no other man within a hundred miles that could play the fiddle, so there was no having a regular frolic without Bob Mosely. The hunters, therefore, were always ready to give him a share of their game in exchange ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... first, Larry was the master's favorite—not because he was particularly studious, but because he took to the fiddle as naturally, Dermot said, "as a ducklin' takes to the wather, just." Indeed, the boy showed such extraordinary talent for music, that, for the mere love of it, Dermot gave him lessons, and often lent him an old fiddle to ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... you, Mr. Brandreth," Annie said. "Then Mrs. Munger has subscribed already, and I'm only second fiddle, after all," she thought. ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... him, the more so that he had been playing a concertina and not a fiddle at all. His feelings were vague, and in some respects contradictory; but he was convinced that Mrs. Prockter's scheme for separating Helen and the Apollo Emanuel was not ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... and boys to go down into the town, while I went further up into the hills with my stick and my dog. In the loveliness of the morning, and the beauty of the hills and valleys, I soon lost my sense of sadness and regret. For nearly an hour I walked along the road to the 'Cat and Fiddle,' and then returned. On the way back, suddenly, without warning, I felt that I was in Heaven—an inward state of peace and joy and assurance indescribably intense, accompanied with a sense of being bathed in a warm glow of light, as though the external condition ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... most of Mrs. Gaynor's songs, already mentioned, and the songs collected by Reinecke, called "Fifty Children's Songs," are excellent for this purpose. The old-fashioned nonsense songs, such as "Billy Boy," "Mary had a Little Lamb" and "Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle," may also have a pleasant and harmless place ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... to 'im, Maria," he muttered uneasily. "He fair makes my flesh creep with that doggoned fiddle of his. 'Tis like a child crying in the dark. I ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... and hubbub was Carlisle city that day; yet, as the two entered the courtyard of the castle, James was aware of another sound, rising clear above the tumult of the town—strains of music, surely, that came from a fiddle. As they stepped under the inner gateway and approached the Norman Keep, the fiddler himself came in sight playing with might and main, under a barred window about six feet from the ground. By the fiddler's side, urging him on, was a ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... very night, I remember, he dined with me. We went to the play together, and afterwards looked in at Lady ALICIA PARBOIL's dance. Dear Lady ALICIA, how plump she was, and how good-natured, and how well she married her fiddle-headed daughters. Her husband too, that clumsy, heavy-witted oaf, how cunningly and how successfully withal she schemed for his advancement. Quid plura? you knew her well, she was devoted to you. I only speak of her to remind you that it was in her hospitable ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 18, 1891 • Various
... and picture-books, but boys like to see things made and done; else how is it that any boy worth his salt will leave the newest and brightest toys to follow a carpenter or a plumber round the house, fiddle with his tools, ask him a thousand questions, and watch him ply his trade? Dickie at New Cross had spent many an hour watching those interesting men who open square trap-doors in the pavement and drag out from them yards and yards of wire. I do not ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... picture in chiaroscuro among the arabesques of the cappella nova in the cathedral at Orvieto. It represents the youthful Orpheus crowned with the laureate wreath playing before Pluto and Proserpine upon a fiddle or crowd of antique pattern. At his feet lies Eurydice, while around are spirits ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... an aesthetic interest, for he had gathered no statistics, had no money to give, and cared nothing for the wrongs of the poor, being content to pay for the pleasure of eye and ear with a tune upon the fiddle. He did not love them the better because they were poor and miserable, and it was only when he found Innismaan and the Blaskets, where there is neither riches nor poverty, neither what he calls 'the nullity of the rich' nor 'the squalor of the poor' that his writing lost its ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... crabs burrow holes in the mud, and in them await your coming, and more often than not baffle your ingenuity to extricate them. Among other stalked-eyed crustaceans is that with one red, shielding claw, absurdly large, and which scuttles among the roots, making a defiant clicking noise—the fiddle or soldier crab (GELASIMUS VOCANS). Oysters seal themselves to the roots, and various sorts of shell-fish gather together—two or three varieties appear to browse upon the leaves and bark of the mangroves; some excavate galleries in the living trunks. The insidious cobra ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... about rules and forms in court when the enemy's cannon are pointed at the door, and the flames encircle the cupola! The man whose stoicism would enable him to philosophize coolly under these circumstances would fiddle while the Capitol was burning, and laugh at the horror and anguish that surrounded him in the midst of the conflagration! I claim not the possession of these remarkable feelings. I concede them all to those who think that the savior of New Orleans ought to be ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... he had held his fiddle, and tuned it upon an arm not quite so stout, I should have known without being told that he was the man who had played in the Saint-Michel cabin while Annabel ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... entrance into the wood, he dismissed him and his attendants, though much against their will, and proceeded on his journey unarmed; from too great a presumption of security, preceded only by a minstrel and a singer, one accompanying the other on the fiddle. The Welsh awaiting his arrival, with Iorwerth, brother of Morgan of Caerleon, at their head, and others of his family, rushed upon him unawares from the thickets, and killed him and many of his followers. Thus it appears how incautious and neglectful of ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... the woodland beauty and the happy fields we till, And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead, And the wise men seeking out marvels and the poet's teaming head. And the painter's hand of wonder, and the marvellous fiddle-bow, And the banded choirs of music—all those that do and know. For all these shall be ours and all men's, nor shall any lack a share Of the toil and the gain of living in the days ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... said Dan, returning the gift with precision. "Ef you don't like my music, git out your fiddle. I ain't goin' to lie here all day an' listen to you an' Long Jack arguin' 'baout candles. Fiddle, Tom Platt; or I'll learn Harve here ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... known from Milton's exquisite "L'Allegro." Sir John Hawkins (vol. ii. page 86) traces it to the Moorish Rebeb; and believes he finds this old three-stringed fiddle in the hands of Chaucer's Absolon, the parish-clerk, who could "plaie songs on a ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... specimen of the Grand Nation familiar to our childhood proved a poor emigre who gained a precarious livelihood as a dancing-master, cook, teacher, or barber, who was profuse of smiles, shrugs, bows, and compliments, prided himself on la belle France, played the fiddle, and took snuff. A more dignified view succeeded, when we read "Telemaque," so long an initiatory text-book in the study of the language, blended as its crystal style was in our imaginations with the pure and noble character of Fenelon. Perhaps the next ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... first violin played this simple melody," whereupon the two sing the verse over again, the player imitating with his arms the movements of a violin player, and with his voice the sound of a squeaking fiddle. Then the conductor says, pointing to another player, "and the big trombone played this simple melody." Then the three sing together, the second player imitating the sound of a trombone and the appearance of a trombone player. This is continued until every ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... whiskey," he said to himself—"it always leaves you keyed up like a fiddle or a woman. I'll get over it after a while or I'll die trying," and he closed his teeth upon each other with a nervous twist that belied his ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... if I was you, Faith—(how pretty you look!)—I'd keep still and not let my head be turned; the old direction's the best; and after all directions are more than dresses. For what's the odds between an embroidered vest and a plain one? Not that it's much to embroider it—I used to fiddle faddle many a one, till I lost my eyes; and I'll teach you to do it in a minute, if you like." With which kind and lucid proposal, Miss Bezac put her hand softly on Faith's waist and smoothed out an imaginary wrinkle ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... he, "wife may as well hang up her fiddle about me; can't make a whistle out of a pig's tail, man, I tell ye! She may fuss up the young'un as much as she's a mind to, but it'll be labor lost over an old chap like me. I feel more at home down here in the old place, ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... Boswell's address and talent for recording gossip, or the Anecdotes would have been a much more racy book. Spence was certainly an amiable, but I think a very weak man; and it appears to me that his learning has been overrated. He might indeed have been well designated as "a fiddle-faddle bit of sterling." ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 25. Saturday, April 20, 1850 • Various
... the belly out of my fiddle," said Johnny Mears to his wife, who sat on a three-legged stool by the rough table in the little whitewashed "end-room", putting a patch of patches over the seat of a pair of moleskin knickerbockers. ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... of an eater. School-teachers are n't as a rule. They pick, and paw, and fiddle round a meal in a way that gives a healthy-appetited person the jim-jams. She did n't touch the fried pumpkin. And the way she sat there at the table in her watch-chain and ribbons made poor old Dave, who sat opposite her ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... understand, the well-edited 'Select Beauties' of an immeasurable waste imbroglio of Heroic Ballads in their respective centuries and countries. Think what strumming of the seven-stringed heroic lyre, torturing of the less heroic fiddle-catgut, in Hellenic Kings' Courts, and English wayside Public Houses; and beating of the studious Poetic brain, and gasping here too in the semi-articulate windpipe of Poetic men, before the Wrath of a Divine Achilles, the Prowess of a ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Guilds, and public and private Bodies of Citizens, from the highest to the lowest, march; the very Hawkers, one finds, have ceased bawling for one day. The neighbouring Villages turn out: their able men come marching, to village fiddle or tambourine and triangle, under their Mayor, or Mayor and Curate, who also walk bespaded, and in tricolor sash. As many as one hundred and fifty thousand workers: nay at certain seasons, as some count, two hundred ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... audience; now bubbling over with witty anecdotes, again exercising his power of graphic portraiture. His elixir vitae—animal spirits—humanized his effort, and, as Sir Robert Peel played upon the House of Commons "as on an old fiddle," so John B. Gough (for it was the versatile comic singer, actor and speaker) sounded the chords ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... most part. I might have had their names on my bills as long as their fingers could hold a pen, but slit me if I like bleeding my own companions. They might have found a place for me, too, had I consented to play second-fiddle where I had been used to lead the band. I' faith, I care not what I turn my hand to amongst strangers, but I would fain leave my memory ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... nothing, but grinned like the head of an old fiddle. Mr. Gibney appeared to swell visibly, after the ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... is long past the, closing hour of one and the tango parlors are dark, suppose we blow this 'Who's Who in Pittsburg' and taxi-cab it out to a roadhouse where the bass fiddle is still inhabited and the second generation is trotting to ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... with Nebuchadnezzar's idolatrous concert of cornet, flute, dulcimer, sackbut, and psaltery; and the ministers, from their overwhelming store of Biblical knowledge, hurled text after text at the "fiddle-players." ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Italian lad does not smoke the mock tobacco that must tempt him upon each ear. If he does, he apes a habit no less American in its origin than the maize itself. So the American lad playing with a 'shoe-string bow' or a 'corn-stalk fiddle' would turn ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... major breed: there is an effect of passing from attenuated parlor tricks into the open, when you take him up. Here, you can but feel, is a masculine man of letters, even if it is his fate to play second fiddle ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... de imbimin' of awjus liquors. De imbimin' of awjus liquors, de wiolution of de Sabbaf, de playin' of de fiddle, and de usin' of by-words, dey is de fo' sins of de conscience; an' if any man sin de fo' sins of de conscience, de debble done sharp his fork fo' dat man.—Ain't that ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... representing day and night, good and evil, and was comforted by the excellent omen. But now I longed for a message of another kind, and chance, if chance there is, brought it, for a man got into the carriage and began to play on a fiddle made apparently of an old blacking-box, and though I am quite unmusical the sounds filled me with the strangest emotions. I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... sure! Interspersed in the hubbub were now and then snatches of merry song, and now and then the notes of a somewhat squeaky and asthmatical violin, invariably followed by some one shouting, "Stop that awful fiddle!" "Hit 'im in the eye with a bit o' biscuit!" or "Grease his bow!" Then a deeper bass voice, evidently Scotch, and just as evidently a junior surgeon's, saying, "Let the laddie practise.—Fiddle away, my boy; I'll thrash all hands if they ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... head, mournfully. "I must depend on my voice; and, provided I do not catch a cold, that will, I hope, produce as much effect as your fiddle." ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... to the elves and the trolls," thought Gertrude. The old man was standing upon the hearth, playing his fiddle, so as not to be in the ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... one of those taverns, where a curtezan in other cities would scarcely vouchsafe to be entertained; but you will be more astonish't when I shall assure you that they drink their crowned cups roundly, strain healths through their smocks, daunce after the fiddle, kiss freely, and tearm it an honourable treat." He furthermore says they were to be found until midnight in company with their lovers at Spring Garden, which seemed to be "contrived to all the advantages of gallantry." From which evidences it may be gathered, ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... teeth, and a golden beard. His appearance was grave, but not morose, as if he were always examining things and people without condemning them. It was evident that he expected to take the upper hand in general, to play the first fiddle, to hold the top saw, to "be helped to all the stuffing of the pumpkin," as dear Uncle Sam was fond of saying. Of moderate stature, almost of middle age, and dressed nicely, without any gewgaws, which look so common upon a gentleman's front, he ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... a fiddle. Let's hit it up, and get to the dock as soon as we can. Think of landing ...
— Frank and Andy Afloat - The Cave on the Island • Vance Barnum
... dreamed that he set two geese to dance, While he took a fiddle and played. He said, "You look pretty and gay, my dears." "We feel very tired," ...
— Merry Words for Merry Children • A. Hoatson
... the Lord! Only God could have brought it to its shape. It feels as if his handgrasp, wearing you had polished you and hollowed you, hollowed this groove in your sides, grasped you under the breasts and brought you to the very quick of your form, subtler than an old, soft-worn fiddle-bow. ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... "Uh-huh—fiddle and er banjer, and the feller that plays the banjer kin tear more music out o' it and stomp on the floor harder'n any other perfesser in the mountains. Better come if Paw ain't run you-all ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders Among the Kentucky Mountaineers • Jessie Graham Flower
... and riding-whips hung on them; and the pictures of his ancestors, in their antiquated dresses, and slender, tarnished, antiquated frames. In his drawing-room you will find none of your new grand pianos and fashionable couches and ottomans; but an old spinet and a fiddle, another set of those long-legged, tall-backed chairs, two or three little settees, a good massy table, and a fine large carved mantle-piece, with bright steel dogs instead of a modern stove, and logs of oak burning, if it be cold. At table, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... the success of his stratagem. He had just transformed the Rose Princess into a fiddle and was about to transform Files into a fiddle bow, when the dragon appeared to interrupt him. ...
— Tik-Tok of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... beauty of her face and the grace of her figure. Jack Kilmeny was to be there later for bridge, and before he came she had to dazzle and placate Verinder, who had been for several days very sulky at having to play second fiddle. ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... need to look so scared. You ain't done nothing wrong. Me and the boys, we like your music. Sing us another tune on that fiddle!" ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
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