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More "Fiddler" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Lusk. "That's my game! And you done your share," she cried to the fiddler. "Here's my regards, old man! ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... blue supper-smoke curled up. The mists were rising from the meadows; earth and sky were blending on the hills; a little silver sickle moon hung in the fading violet, low in the western sky. Under an old oak in a green place a fiddler and a piper were playing, and youths and maidens were dancing in the brown light. Some little chaps were playing blindman's-buff near by, and the older folk were gathered by ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... on the table with his knuckles, as if there was a room full of people asking him to sing. In short, my father was drunk as a fiddler; the last brew finished him; and he began roaring away all kinds of droll songs, and telling all manner of stories as if he was at ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... cried he to his companion; "for Mr. Toil will never dare to show his face where there is a fiddler, and where people are dancing and making merry. We shall be ...
— Little Daffydowndilly - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a house of entertainment which must have been popular, since it contained a dancing-hall, admission to which was free, any man being privileged to invite to it any woman whom he fancied and for whose diversion he was willing to disburse a penny to the fiddler. He was accompanied on this occasion by his dog, who insisted on following him into the hall and persisted in keeping at his heels while he danced,—a proof of its fidelity which created considerable amusement, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... been made aware of the fact that this fiddler only availed himself, in his vain exhibitions, of a part of the felis which was not necessary to its felicity after death, I determined to give a portion of my worldly goods toward the building of a light-house on the Norway coast, for which purpose, I heard it averred, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... Where from now? Why, you're as fine as a fiddler!" cried Mr. Joel Ferris, who was fast becoming familiar, on the strength of ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... Which tho' they're known to be so ample, We need not copy from example. We're not the only persons durst 895 Attempt this province, nor the first. In northern clime a val'rous Knight Did whilom kill his bear in fght, And wound a fiddler; we have both Of these the objects of our wroth, 900 And equal fame and glory from Th' attempt of victory to come. 'Tis sung, there is a valiant Mamaluke In foreign land, yclep'd — To whom we have been oft compar'd 905 For person, parts; address, and beard; ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... Whereto the fiddler answered, "Never was king of any land better or happier, nor his kinsmen nor vassals; know that for certain. Right glad were they when we set ...
— The Fall of the Niebelungs • Unknown
... ceremonies. On the seat sits the bride in the full dress of the country, and wearing her bridal crown; by her side the bridegroom, also well adorned for the occasion; and, on the step of the cart, that most important person, the fiddler, working his bow with astounding energy. If the pony can bear the weight, perhaps a couple of the bride's relations will sit up behind, otherwise they will walk in the procession which follows; and there may be seen all the available peasants of the district—young men and maidens, grandfathers ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... quite so punctual as you would have me believe," said Mr. Percy; "there is not even a fiddler visible." ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... formed to a great extent before he went abroad, his ideas of pictorial effect were broadened and his technical resources enriched by his sojourn in Italy. Some of the work executed immediately after his return, such as the portraits of Lord President Dundas, Neil Gow, the famous fiddler, and the earlier of two portraits of his friend John Clerk of Eldin, shows, with much unity, a greater care and precision in the handling of detail, a more searched kind of modelling and a fuller sense of tone, and thicker impasto ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... go and have a drop of ale; the fiddler is there.' 'No, brother, I never drank a drop of ale since my aunt went (died).' 'Well, take some tobacco, brother?' 'No, no, I have not smoked since my wife fell in the water and never came out again alive.' 'Well, let's go and play at cock-shy, ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... marching in a body to cultivate the earth with a fiddler at their head, and dancing from time to time, to rest themselves from walking. There is every year, near Naples, a festival consecrated to the madonna of the grotto, at which the girls dance to the sound of the tambourine and the castanets, and it is not uncommon for ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... was two days baking cakes at the train stops. Friends got together little presents for the bride. Jed, Molly's brother, himself a fiddler of parts, organized an orchestra of a dozen pieces. The Rev. Henry Doak, a Baptist divine of much nuptial diligence en route, made ready his best coat. They came into camp. In the open spaces of the valley hundreds of wagons were scattered, ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... of bamboo sharpened like a knife in one hand, he held another piece in the other, split in two, with the convex part uppermost, in which he had cut a small notch. He began passing the sharp piece slowly over the other, as a fiddler does his bow over his fiddle—strings, increasing in rapidity, till, in a very short time, the powder produced by the friction ignited, and fell down upon the ashes. This he quickly blew up, and even more rapidly than I could have done with my burning-glass, a flame was produced. The smoke which ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... revenged the following winter by a dark-haired Roumanian fiddler, who beat her and forced her to carry her jewels to a pawnshop, where they were redeemed at half price by their original donour and used to adorn the plump, firm body of a ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... Vermichel, formerly violinist in the Bourgogne regiment, was occupied, during the Restoration, with the various callings of fiddler, door-keeper of the Hotel de Ville, drum-beater of Soulanges, jailer of the local prison, and finally bailiff's deputy in the service of Brunet. He was intimate friend of Fourchon, with whom he was in the habit of getting on sprees, and ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... young man of agreeable, easy manners. With him I went to Indianapolis, and thence by "stages," waggons, or on horseback through a very dismal country in gloomy winter into the interior of the State. I can remember vast marshy fields with millions of fiddler crabs scuttling over them, and more mud than I had ever seen in my life. The village streets were six inches deep in soft mud up to the doors and floors of the houses. At last we reached our journey's end at a large log-house ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... small fiddle; to crowd v. to grate as the two ends of a broken bone, to make a flat creaking; Crowder s. a fiddler (W. crwthwr) ...
— A Glossary of Provincial Words & Phrases in use in Somersetshire • Wadham Pigott Williams
... day of heavy toil at log-rolling, the young men and boys bantered one another into foot races, wrestling matches, shooting contests, and other feats of strength or skill. And if a fiddler could be found, the day was sure to end with a "hoe-down"—a dance that "made even the log-walled house tremble." No corn-husking or wedding was complete without dancing, although members of certain of the more straitlaced religious sects already ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... sawing: so the fiddler in Italian is called the "village-saw" (Sega del villaggio). He is the Alnaschar of the Englished Galland and Richardson. The tale is very old. It appears as the Brahman and the Pot of Rice in the Panchatantra; and Professor Benfey believes ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... kept on, resolved to be still on the floor when the other had abandoned it in defeat—that being the test of victory. At last, the girl from Dryhill reeled, and was caught by half-a-dozen arms. Her adversary, holding the floor undisputed, slowed down, and someone stopped the fiddler. Sally turned from the crowded wall, and began looking about for Samson. He was not there. Lescott had seen him leave the house a few moments before, and started over to intercept the girl, as she ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... after the affair was over, and a group of girls had gathered in her room, "'Every dog has his day.' We had ours last year; and next year you will pay the fiddler for a ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... fiddler, he had a fiddle, And a very fine fiddle had he; Twee tweedle dee, tweedle dee, ...
— Denslow's Mother Goose • Anonymous
... Fortescue, however,[86] has told us that in his youth the Duke learnt to play the violin, and that he only abandoned it, when he was about thirty years old, "because he judged it unseemly or perhaps ill-sounding for a General to be a fiddler." The Duke is not the only great soldier who has been a musical performer. Marshal St. Cyr used to play the violin "in the quiet moments of a campaign," and Sir Hope Grant was a very fair performer on ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... Was a merry old soul, And a merry old soul was he; He called for his pipe, And he called for his bowl, And he called for his fiddlers three. Every fiddler, he had a fine fiddle, And a very fine fiddle had he; Twee tweedle dee, tweedle dee, went the fiddlers. Oh, there's one so rare, As can compare With old King Cole and his ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... know is that Mary Simmons says she gave ten thousand dollars and Josie Fiddler says it was three hundred,—so you can ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... Some nights there was music on the stage; a young lady in a white robe with a golden harp, and attended by a gentleman in black mustachios. This was when the principal harpiste of the King of Saxony and his first fiddler happened to be passing through Mowbray, merely by accident, or on a tour of pleasure and instruction, to witness the famous scenes of British industry. Otherwise the audience of the Cat and Fiddle, we mean the Temple of the Muses, were fain to be content ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... united like one long coloured scarf that undulated across the fields, along the narrow path winding amid the green corn, soon lengthened out, and broke up into different groups that loitered to talk. The fiddler walked in front with his violin, gay with ribbons at its pegs. Then came the married pair, the relations, the friends, all following pell-mell; the children stayed behind amusing themselves plucking the bell-flowers from oat-ears, or playing amongst themselves ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... printed in The Merry-Thought as well as the author of the dedication, but the dedication was itself signed with the name "Hurlo Thrumbo." Similarly, the title-page listed Hurlo Thrumbo as the publisher of the work. In 1729 Hurlothrumbo: or, The Super-Natural, a play by a half-mad dancer and fiddler, Samuel Johnson of Cheshire (1691-1773), had set all of London talking. The irrational, amusing speeches and actions of Hurlothrumbo, the play's title-character, gained instant fame, and two years later Roberts, by attributing his collection ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1 • Samuel Johnson [AKA Hurlo Thrumbo]
... of the choir were managed tolerably well, the vocal parts generally lagging a little behind the instrumental, and some loitering fiddler now and then making up for lost time by travelling over a passage with prodigious celerity, and clearing more bars than the keenest fox-hunter, to be in at the death. But the great trial was an anthem that had been prepared and arranged by Master Simon, and on which he had founded ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... sings, plays on the violin wonderfully, composes, is mad, and not very sensible. He is called an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole; a somebody that married a great fortune in Mexico, and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople; a priest, a fiddler, a vast nobleman, The Prince of Wales has had unsatiated curiosity about him, but in vain. However, nothing has been made out against him -.' he is released: and, what convinces me that he is not a ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... rim of a slouchy felt hat, and raising it at every inquiry. "Massa sold me, fore I was old 'nuff to know my mudder, to a preacher man in Florida. Bimeby massa die, and missus, she had a musical turn o' mind, and swapped me off for a fiddler; but de people all got de laf on de ole 'oman, for in two or free months the old fiddler died, and she lost us both," and ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... "That same first fiddler who leads the orchestra to-night Here fiddled four decades of years ago; He bears the same babe-like smile of self-centred delight, Same trinket on watch-chain, same ring on the hand ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... at old Collins', Quite a bunch was there before, You could hear the fiddler calling, And the scraping on the floor. Through the dingy sodhouse window Gleamed a sickly yellow light, Where I helped you from the wagon, Holding you so loving tight. Then they called out, "Choose your pardners, Numbers five, six, seven, and eight," And we hustled up to join in, For ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... there was to be a beggar's wedding in the neighborhood. He was resolved not to miss the opportunity of seeing so curious a ceremony; and that he might enjoy the whole completely, proposed to Dr. Sheridan that he should go thither disguised as a blind fiddler, with a bandage over his eyes, and he would attend him as his man to lead him. Thus accoutred, they reached the scene of action, where the blind fiddler was received with joyful shouts. They had ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... Devonshire extraction. His mother had kept the pleasantest public-house in town, and at her death Bill succeeded to her property and popularity. All the young ladies in the neighbourhood of Fiddler's Row, where he resided, set their caps at him: all the most fashionable prigs, or tobymen, sought to get him into their set; and the most crack blowen in London would have given her ears at any time for a loving word from ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it's all over—that note was given Madame St. Germain for tuition of a young girl, Miss Julia Vining, whom I educated with the romantic notion of making her my wife, when she should arrive at a suitable age, at which period she ran off with a one-eyed French fiddler, and is now taking in sewing at ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... that its catalogue is likely to contain what it may wish should be read. {117} Here we selected a very interesting volume with many illustrations, suitable for the girl's reading; and soon at the cafe again, I bowed to the senior fiddler, who nodded assent, and then the poor pale lonely girl had the pleasant book as a remembrance of home placed in her hands, and a promise given her that a good Christian lady ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... coming along with a bunch of men and supplies to show them the way to our claim. Twenty jacks, a cook and a fiddler will be here late this afternoon, together with a knock-down bunk-house, sufficient food supplies for two weeks, tools, and I've got a supply of cash to pay the hands. Now what have you to say ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... abroad. She had not liked Europe—being quite frankly a provincial person. To Castleman County a foreigner was a strange, dark person who mixed up his consonants, and was under suspicion of being a fiddler or an opera-singer. The people she had met under her husband's charge had been socially indubitable, but still, they were foreigners, and Sylvia could never really be sure what they ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... a fiddler fiddle? I have. I heard a fiddler fiddle, and the hey-dey-diddle of his frolicking fiddle called back the happy days of my boyhood. The old field schoolhouse with its batten doors creaking on wooden hinges, its windows innocent of glass, and its great, yawning fireplace, cracking and ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... crustacean known as the "fiddler crab" is unusually numerous in the marshes of Long Island, this summer. It differs from impecunious persons inasmuch as it is a burrowing, not a borrowing, creature. It differs from ordinary fiddlers by two letters, in ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 23, September 3, 1870 • Various
... ragged of the beggar-maids. "Mistress Mary," in her pretty blue dress, tripped along with "Simple Simon" staring about him like a blockhead. The fine lady left her horse to dance with "Bobby Shafto" till every bell on her slippers tinkled its tongue out. "Bo-Peep" and a jolly fiddler skipped gayly up and down. "Miss Muffet" took the big spider for her partner, and made his many legs fly about in the wildest way. The little wife got out of the wheelbarrow to help "Boy Blue" along, and Molly, with the frying-pan over her shoulder, ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... amusement in observing the various personages that daily passed and repassed beneath my window. The character which most of all arrested my attention was a poor blind fiddler, whom I first saw chanting a doleful ballad at the door of a small tavern near the gate of the village. He wore a brown coat, out at elbows, the fragment of a velvet waistcoat, and a pair of tight nankeens, so short as hardly to reach below his calves. A little foraging cap, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... very phrase evokes and parades a pageant of amours! The thousand heartaches; the fingers clutching hungrily at keys that might be other fingers; the fiddler with his eyelids clenched while he dreams that the violin, against his cheek is the satin cheek of "the inexpressive She;" the singer with a cry in every note; the moonlit youth with the mandolin tinkling his serenade to an ivied window; the dead-marches; the nocturnes; the amorous ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... Here the fiddler struck up a jig, which cut short the gossip of the priest and made a diversion for his hearers. Some of the young fellows and girls present fell to footing it, and called on Tim and me to join in. But I was too much out of heart even to look on; and as for Tim, he glared as if he would have ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... men had brought a fiddler from the village, and it was not long before most of the company were treading the measures of reels or cotillons on the grass. How merry and happy they all were! How freely and unembarrassedly they moved and ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... the fiddler represented as a Frenchman? France, as a whole, is reputed to be the ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... the tide we may find a crab or two, perhaps, some jelly-fish, star-fish, and those wonderful living flowers, the sea-anemones. And then we will watch the great gulls sweeping about in the air, and if we are lucky, we may see an army of little fiddler-crabs marching along, each one with one claw in the air. We may gather sea-side diamonds; we may, perhaps, go in and bathe, and who can tell everything that we may do on the shores of ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... been called Out of Paganini—founded upon that distinguished fiddler's life, although (as the Author says) "it is necessarily speculative as to ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... greatest fiddler, till Paganini, that has appeared. He was born in the territory of Bologna, in 1653, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... the spires beneath the paly moon, And through the cloister peace and silence reign, Save where some fiddler scrapes a drowsy tune, Or copious bowls inspire ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... good white man. He was a grand fiddler and he used to call us to de big house at night to dance for him. I couldn't do nothin' 'cept jump up and down and I sho' did git tired. Marse Jabe warn't married. He raised his brother's chillun, but dey was all grown ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... Music.] — N. musician, artiste, performer, player, minstrel; bard &c (poet) 597; [specific types of musicians] accompanist, accordionist, instrumentalist, organist, pianist, violinist, flautist; harper, fiddler, fifer^, trumpeter, piper, drummer; catgut scraper. band, orchestral waits. vocalist, melodist; singer, warbler; songster, chaunter^, chauntress^, songstress; cantatrice^. choir, quire, chorister; chorus, chorus singer; liedertafel [G.]. nightingale, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... old fiddler's advice, Deemster—have nothing to do with the women. When they're young they're kittens to play with you, but when they're old they're cats to ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... bourgeois sphere, but it was not until July, 1782,—just after he had finished reading Wagner's 'Infanticide',—that the plan of 'Louise Miller' began to take shape in his mind. Gemmingen's poor artist, Wehrmann, became the poor fiddler, Miller, and the daughter Lotte was rechristened Louise. The aristocratic lover, Gemmingen's Karl, was named Ferdinand von Walter, and Amaldi was converted into Lady Milford. One of Gemmingen's subordinate characters, the foppish nobleman, Dromer, who ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Fiddler, play a little longer! Why this hurry, say? I'm but half-way through a measure— Yet a little play! Smiling in her wreath of flowers Is my love not fair? See us in the charmed circle, Flitting light as air! Haste thee, loved one, for the music Shall be hushed anon... (O sweet years of ...
— Songs of Labor and Other Poems • Morris Rosenfeld
... interest and romantic effect to the principle here spoken of. Were they constant, they would become indifferent, as we may find with respect to disagreeable noises, which we do not hear after a time. I know no situation more pitiable than that of a blind fiddler who has but one sense left (if we except the sense of snuff-taking(1)) and who has that stunned or deafened by his own ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... gave a treat to all the hands at the mill, with hard cider and apples and nuts a plenty, and even had Blind Dick, the fiddler, who lived in Tom Reed's upper cabin, to help them make merry. That is, Andy gave the treat, but his foreman was host; he never came himself. Jane was there and Dan monopolized her. He knew her well, so that night ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... is to our common speech; and even to write down modern Irish by ear I was poorly qualified. Things were made harder, too, by the manner of recitation, as traditional as the words. He chanted, with a continuous vocalisation, and while he chanted, elbow and knee worked like a fiddler's or piper's marking the time. However, with persistence, I got the thing down, letting him first say a verse fully through, then writing line by line or as near as I could; then going back and ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... encouraging at the time, and kept our lads in good heart; but, in the long run, it has proved demoralizing to our critics as well as to their clients. For, now that the war is over, those who so loyally proclaimed that any bugle-boy was a better musician than any fiddler find themselves incapable of distinguishing, not only between fiddlers, but even between buglers. Perhaps it was natural that when, during the war, T.S. Eliot, about the best of our young poets—if ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... a famous Hungarian Fiddler, accompanied by a warbling Guinea Hen and backed up by sixty Symphonic Heineys wearing Spectacles, was giving a Recital for the True Lovers in a Mammoth ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... as you may possibly become, have never achieved anything. We're too sane; we're merely reasonable. We lack the human touch, the compelling enthusiastic mania. People are quite ready to listen to the philosophers for a little amusement, just as they would listen to a fiddler or a mountebank. But as to acting on the advice of the men of reason—never. Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... having at length returned from the fiddler hunt, and being whisped over, and made tolerably decent, Mr. Watchorn, having exchanged the postilion saddle in which it had been ridden for a horn-cased hunting one, had mounted, and, opening the kennel-door, ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... It was a blind fiddler, in Islay, who told the story of Conall, as it had been handed down by tradition from generation to generation; just as thousands of years before the story of Odysseus and Polyphemos was told by Greek bards ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... White Lion on its hinder legs, and there was one a year or two since of George the Fourth in a Highland dress—a powerful representation of Lady Charlotte Bury, dressed for Norval. Look at that gem of art, his Blind Fiddler, now in the National Gallery, or at his Waterloo Gazette, or at the Rent Day, and compare any one of them with the senseless stuff he now produces, and grieve. His John Knox—ill placed for effect, as relates ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... mankind can possibly be. But they are not properly qualified for this object of their ambition. The want of a regular education, and early habits, and some lurking remains of their dignity, will never permit them to become a match for an Italian eunuch, a mountebank, a fiddler, a player, or any regular practitioner of that tribe. The Roman emperors, almost from the beginning, threw themselves into such hands; and the mischief increased every day till the decline and final ruin of the empire. It is therefore of very great importance (provided the thing is not overdone) ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... stood in the door, That sassy bug mus' be drownded sure! But thar war Goggle-eyes, peart an' gay, Twangin' an' a-tunin' up—'Now, dance away! Ye may sarch night an' day ez a constancy An' ye won't find a fiddler sech ez me! Sech ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... express, brings intelligence of the landing of Napoleon. The king performs a sacrifice: but the entrails are unfavourable; and the victim is without a heart. He prepares to encounter the invader. A young captain of the guard,—the son of Maria Antoinette by Apollo,—in the shape of a fiddler, rushes in to tell him that Napoleon is approaching with a vast army. The royal forces are drawn out for battle. Full catalogues are given of the regiments on both sides; their ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... he could afford to despise pedantry: did he meet a traveller who amused his fancy he would give him the pass-word ('the fiddler's paid,' or what not), as though the highway had not its code of morals; nor did he scruple, when it served his purpose, to rob the bunglers of his own profession. By this means, indeed, he raised the standard of the Road and warned the incompetent to embrace an easier trade. While he never took ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... how Hopewell found it, and strung it himself, and used to play on it slyly, and so taught himself to be a fiddler, before his mother had any idea he knew one note from another. She was extremely deaf at the last and could not hear him playing at odd ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... neighboring rag-shops attend to buy, and candle-makers send their agents to collect fat and grease. Every individual brings his own food, for the proprietor of the house finds lodging only, and not board. The atmosphere reeks with the smell of herrings and fried sausages. After supper is finished, a fiddler—one of their number, paid for his services by contributions of tobacco and beer—strikes up some merry music; dancing commences, and goes on till midnight, and often far into the morning. Save in such houses, such dancing and such dancers were never seen. The lame cast aside their crutches, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fairies or human, without music was a thing not to be thought of. So, although at first some fairies grumbled and held back, and were quite sulky about it, even muttering other grumpy words, they at last all agreed, and Puck sent for the fiddler to make ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... A poor ragged fiddler had spent the whole of one bitter winter morning playing through the dreary streets without any taking pity upon his plight. As he came to the cathedral he felt an overmastering desire to enter and pour out his distress in the presence of his Maker. ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... would, hey? All I got t' say is that yer nerve gits me. An' ye stand a pretty good show of bein' rounded up for more'n thirty days, too. Well, ye've had yer joke; mebbe ye have th' price t' pay th' fiddler. Turn here." ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... well-practiced plunge, and very little toil of body, two ancient sailors, one considerably older than the other, inasmuch as he was his father, yet chips alike from a sturdy block, and fitted up with jury-stumps. Old Joe pulled rather the better oar, and called his son "a one-legged fiddler" when he missed the dip of wave; while Mordacks stood with his leg's apart, and playing the easy part of critic, had his sneers at both of them. But they let him gibe to his liking; because they knew their ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... put down riots by magic; and how much Ninus surpassed in abilities any of his successors on the throne of Assyria. The moderns, Sir William owns, have found out the circulation of blood; but, on the other hand, they have quite lost the art of conjuring; nor can any modern fiddler enchant fishes, fowls, and serpents by his performance. He tells us that "Thales, Pythagoras, Democritus, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus made greater progresses in the several empires of science than any of their successors have since been able to reach"; which is just as ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... your native land. But your patriotism recalls dangerously the restaurant Magyar, the fiddler in the frogged coat. You draw from your violin passionate laments. In a sort of ecstasy you celebrate Hungaria. Then, smiling brilliantly, you ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... no," said Tarleton, haughtily; "we can drink not with the Don; but we'll have the wine, and he shall drink it. Meanwhile, Don, tell us what possible combination of circumstances made thee fiddler, barber, ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the head of the procession to kindle it. Failure to light the fires would, in the popular belief, have exposed the fields to the greatest danger. At Revin the young folk, besides dancing round the fire to the strains of the village fiddler, threw garlands of flowers across the flames to each other.[468] In the Vosges it is still customary to kindle bonfires upon the hill-tops on Midsummer Eve; the people believe that the fires help to preserve the fruits of the ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... fortune, we again got into deep water, and in half an hour anchored off the town in a favourable position for cannonading it. We then landed our force, consisting of all the marines, with the drummer and fiddler, besides a party of small-arm men from the blue jackets, all armed with muskets, bayonets, and cutlasses. The officers, in addition to their swords, carried pistols in their belts. A feu-de-joie was now fired, for the double purpose of creating an awe among the crowd, and ascertaining that ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... remember me, Miss Trent, but I knew your father well enough, and I knew you when you was a little 'un. In those days I had the "Green Man" in the Cut; your father often enough gave us a toon on his fiddle. A rare good fiddler he was, too! Give us a song ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... it's beyond his natural strength; but it is more likely that he was badly taught. Many teachers set their pupils on to strain, and stretch, so that they get used up, body and mind, in a few months. Depend upon it, the same thing is true in other arts. I once taught a fiddler that used to get a hundred guineas for playing two or three tunes; and he told me that it was just the same thing with the fiddle—that when you laid a tight hold on your fiddle-stick, or even set your teeth hard together, you could do nothing but rasp like the fellows that play in bands ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... reft of pin, her play-bill from above; Like Icarus, while laughing galleries clap, Soars, ducks, and dives in air the printed scrap; But, wiser far than he, combustion fears, And, as it flies, eludes the chandeliers; Till, sinking gradual, with repeated twirl, It settles, curling, on a fiddler's curl, Who from his powder'd pate the intruder strikes, And, for mere malice, sticks it ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... and pleasure for the night. I cried until I could cry no more. However, I was determined I would not be done out of my sport after being at the expense of coming, so I went round and borrowed some pins, and pinned up my shirt tail as well as I could. I then went into the dance, and told the fiddler to play me a jig. Che, che, che, went the fiddle, when the banjo responded with a thrum, thrum, thrum, with the loud cracking of the bone player. I seized a little Sambo gal, and round and round the room we went, my money and ...
— Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky • Jacob D. Green
... when this good substantial fare Has gien 'em satisfaction, They side(2) all t' chairs, an' stand i' pairs, Wi' heels i' tune for action. See-sawing, t' fiddler now begins The best that he is able; He rosins t' stick an' screws up t' pins An' jumps up on to t' table, To ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... God knows! Probably you would find a blanchisseuse on the ground floor, and on the fourth a poet or perhaps a musician, like our fiddler of Louise. This is the real Bohemia, you know—not the conscious Bohemia, but the true one, that is lawless simply because it knows ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... tarnal Greaser," exclaimed Dick, "your jig's danced, an' you must settle with the fiddler. If I only had you out on the prairie, I'd larn you a few things I reckon you never heern tell on. Come here, you keerless feller, an' tell me if you 'member what I said to you yesterday! ...
— Frank Among The Rancheros • Harry Castlemon
... Betsy generously offered "to pay the fiddler," as she termed it, "provided 'Tilda would never let it get to Silverton that Betsy Barlow was seen inside a playhouse!" To Mrs. Tubbs it seemed impossible that Aunt Betsy could be in earnest, ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... have an end; even the stanchest mountain fiddler will reach at last his limit of endurance and must needs be refreshed and fed. There was a sudden significant flourish of frisky bowing, now up and again down, enlisting every resonant capacity of horsehair and catgut; the violins quavered ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... completing the first volume, appeared in 1836 and 1837. The value of these stories was not at first perceived, and they sold slowly. Andersen was more successful for the time being with a novel, O.T., and a volume of sketches, In Sweden; in 1837 he produced the best of his romances, Only a Fiddler. He now turned his attention, with but ephemeral success, to the theatre, but was recalled to his true genius in the charming miscellanies of 1840 and 1842, the Picture-Book without Pictures, and A Poet's Bazaar. Meanwhile the fame of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... cosmopolitan productions. A famous Italian opera star has rhymed in her native lingo; a popular French acrobat—possibly one of a company of strolling equestrians—has immortalised himself in Parisian heroics. M. Pianatowsky, the Polish fiddler, has scrawled something incomprehensible in Russian or Arabic—no matter which; while Mein Herr Van Trinkenfeld comes out strong in double Dutch. Need I add that the immortal Smith of London is in great force in the book, or that ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... being missed at the ball. But later, or rather the next day, I recrossed the road and began a search for the money which I was confident had been left in the woods opposite, by the person I had been following. I found it, and when the man here present who, though a mere fiddler, has presumed to take a leading part in this interview, came upon me with the bills in my hand, I was but burying deeper the ill-gotten ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... to his opinion, "though I am sure you must have pretty nigh all the books in the world already. But I never can desire—I may be wrong—but I never can desire, that my son, and the grandson of the Marquis of Esmond, should be a fiddler." ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... new top couple starting off again as soon as they got there; all top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them! When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out, "Well done!" and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that purpose. But, scorning rest upon his reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... to say to the little yellow fiddler, after an evening's frolic at the Interpreter's, "Davids, clear away the tables and the glasses, and play fishes-hornspikes."[55] He was a kind, affectionate creature, and his devotion to "Monsieur Johns" and "Madame Johns" ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... an itinerant fiddler. The character is a skit on Anthony Munday, the dramatist.—Chettle, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... capstan—off we go, As the fiddler swings us round, With a yeo heave ho, And a rum below, Hurrah ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... relieved from her plight by the fact that as the fiddler stopped and the faint applause died out, she saw Mr. Harrison coming towards her. Mr. Harrison had somehow succeeded in extricating himself from the difficulty in which his hostess had placed him, and had no doubt guessed that Helen was no better ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... was chatting amicably to the parents till the last of her small performers should appear, seemed suddenly turned to stone, with mouth gaping and eyes wide. The old fiddler, who was rather short-sighted, struck up the strains, and the dancers began to dance. The audience relaxed, leaning back in their chairs to enjoy the scene. Miss Dewhurst was still frozen. There were murmured comments. "How curious to have that boy there! ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... answered, brightly. "I carry that just as a fiddler carries his fiddle—ready for a ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... the Amazonian species. She tripped up Pat Morgan, and laid that athlete suddenly on his back, upon the grass plot before the hall door, to his eternal disgrace, when he 'offered' to kiss her, while the fiddler and tambourine-man were playing. She used to wring big boys by the ears; overawe fishwives with her voluble invective; put dangerous dogs to rout with sticks and stones, and evince, in all emergencies, an adventurous spirit ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... old-time country fiddlers—all of them, black or white—how wonderful they were! They have always been the wonder and the despair of all musicians who have played by rule and note. The very way that the country fiddler held his fiddle against his chest and never against his shoulder like the trained musician! The very way that the country fiddler grasped his bow, firmly and squarely in the middle, and never lightly at the end like a trained musician! The very way that he let go and went off and kept on—the ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... herd was inclined to be very tractable. Flood, with all his experience, well knew that if stampeded cattle ever got into a known trail, they were certain to turn backward over their course; and we were now paying the fiddler for lack ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... to the broken shutter and looked in. Around the blackened walls of the room stood a bleared mob, applausively watching, through a fog of smoke, the contortions of an old woman in a red calico wrapper, who was dancing in the centre of the floor. The fiddler—a rubicund person evidently not suffering from any great depression of spirit through the circumstance of being "out on bail," as he was, to Joe's intimate knowledge—sat astride a barrel, resting his instrument ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... girl by the name of Sadie, and a small red-head, tragically faded, with soft brown eyes that should never have looked upon Bullard's. Two men rose and took them as the tune, an old-fashioned waltz, began to ripple under the fingers of the fiddler, who was a born musician, and the four swung down between the tables and the bar. The Golden Cloud was in full swing, running free for the night, though the soft twilight was scarcely faded from the beautiful ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... comfortable, were of coarse homespun—the product of their own labour. The sources of amusement were limited. The day of the harmonium or piano had not come. Music, except in its simplest vocal form, was not cultivated; only the occasional presence of some fiddler afforded rare seasons of merriment to the delight ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... expression. Gregory Hawtrey was a little casual in speech, but so far most of the young women he bestowed an epithet of that kind upon had attached no significance to it. They had wisely decided that he did not mean anything. In another moment or two the Scottish fiddler's voice ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... of King Arthur, and Chevy Chase too, of which even your fellow-sinner Sidney cannot deny that every time he hears it even from a blind fiddler it stirs his heart like a trumpet-blast. Speak well of the bridge that carries you over, man! Did you find your Redcross Knight in Virgil, or such a dame as Una in old Ovid? No more than you did your Pater and Credo, you renegado baptized ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... to remember. For one sometimes hears ignorant persons speak of technique with a certain supercilious contempt, as though it were a mere negligible and inferior element in an artist's equipment and not the art itself, the mere virtuosity of an accomplished fiddler who seems to say anything with his fiddle, and has never really said anything in his whole life. To the artist technique is another matter. It is the little secret by which he reveals his soul, by which he reveals the soul of the world. Through ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... strokes of labour as of the evening hour when the professional village story-teller cries "cric-crac" and begins his tale of the loup-garou, or rouses the spirit of a pure patriotism by a crude epic of some valiant atavar; when the parish fiddler brings them to their feet with shining eyes by the strains of O Carillon. They are not less respectful to the British flag, nor less faithful in allegiance because they love that language and that land of their memories which they know full well is not the Republican ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... robbed him of all his cash and valuable effects, had eloped from his house with one of his own customers, who appeared in the character of a French count, but was in reality no other than an Italian fiddler; that, in consequence of this retreat, he, the husband, was disabled from paying a considerable sum which he had set apart for his wine merchant, who being disappointed in his expectation, took out an execution against his effects; and the rest of his creditors ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... scatch. On a side-board was placed for us, who had come off the sea, a substantial dinner, and a variety of wines. Then we had coffee and tea. I observed in the room several elegantly bound books and other marks of improved life. Soon afterwards a fiddler appeared, and a little ball began. Rasay himself danced with as much spirit as any man, and Malcolm bounded like a roe. Sandie Macleod, who has at times an excessive flow of spirits, and had it now, was, in his days of absconding, known by the name of M'Cruslick, which it seems was the designation ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... said a farmer, who was standing by, "he's gone to get drunk; he is the biggest old drunkard in the countryside, and yet they do say he was gentleman once, and the best fiddler in London; but he can't be depended on, so no ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... pealings, of course they do! and the third fiddler, little Tweaks, of the county town, goes into fits. Ho, ho, ho, I can't bear it (mimicking); take me out! Ha, ha, ha! O what a one she is! She'll be the death of me. Ha, ha, ha, ha! ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... fiddle," cried Judith peremptorily. A chair was set upon a table in the corner, the rather reluctant Wade hoisted to it, and soon "Weevily Wheat," as the twitting tune comes from the country fiddler's jigging bow, was ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... maladies came thick upon him. His asthma tormented him day and night. Dropsical symptoms made their appearance. While sinking under a complication of diseases, he heard that the woman whose friendship had been the chief happiness of sixteen years of his life had married an Italian fiddler; that all London was crying shame upon her; and that the newspapers and magazines were filled with allusions to the Ephesian matron, and the two pictures in Hamlet. He vehemently said that he would try to forget her existence. He never ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... plain that an alliance with a foreign fiddler was certain to shock British respectability. It is the old story of the quarrel between Philistia and Bohemia. Nor was respectability without much to say for itself. Piozzi was a Catholic as well as a foreigner; to marry him was in all probability to break ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... at her. "I shall not open 'the fiddler's bill' until—until I have to." At the door he turned. She had risen and was kneeling on the sofa, her elbow on its low arm, her chin upon her hand, her eyes staring into the fire. He came ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... this speech, Princess Altamira bade the king, her father, good-bye, and was on the point of leaving the royal presence, when the handsome figure of Felisberto, the blind fiddler, was seen to approach. ...
— Tales from the Lands of Nuts and Grapes - Spanish and Portuguese Folklore • Charles Sellers and Others
... there in Maine, anyhow? She hadn't written for some time; and he hadn't had a word from Peter Champneys. And when Marcia came home and found out he'd been meddling—well, the meddler would have to pay the fiddler, ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... promise. He had enjoyed the consideration for his promise; his notes were secure and the hypothecated bonds had been redeemed. He was on his feet and Governor, thanks to Elton's interposition, and now he was called on to do his part—to pay the fiddler. ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... third fiddler was different. He was a man after Buster Bumblebee's own heart. He seemed to love to make music and never tired of coaxing the jolliest tunes out of his old fiddle that anybody could hope to hear. He only laughed when his ...
— The Tale of Buster Bumblebee • Arthur Scott Bailey
... dance waxed warm again. The fiddle shrieked, the government stogies thundered upon the puncheon floor; but soon it was evident that all things were not as they had been from the beginning. Confusion first fell upon the fiddler. His dulcet notes, as they whirled through their lofty flight, reeled, and staggered, and fell, to give place to anathemas, steady and well sustained. Smoke filled the tent, and came creeping out through every ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... cordiality. He looked up and there was an old pal, with whom he had been associated in many a merry bout and pleasant felony; he had not seen the man for two years; a friendly glass was offered and accepted. Two girls were of the party, to oblige whom Robinson's old acquaintance sent for Blind Bill, the fiddler, and soon Robinson was dancing and shouting with the girls like mad—"High cut," "side cut," "heel and toe," "sailor's ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... typical conflict, the conflict between the individual and that which, in Ireland, has much authority, the family group. This particular conflict was shown again in "The Fiddler's House." where the life, not of the actual peasants, but of rural people with artistic and aristocratic traditions, ...
— Three Plays • Padraic Colum
... something; but much more was to be done, that I might be universally allowed to be a fine gentleman. I appeared at court on all publick days; betted at gaming-tables; and played at all the routs of eminence. I went every night to the opera, took a fiddler of disputed merit under my protection, became the head of a musical faction, and had sometimes concerts at my own house. I once thought to have attained the highest rank of elegance, by taking a foreign singer into keeping. But my favourite fiddler contrived to be arrested, on the night of a concert, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... a speech with airy bacchanalianism, glass in hand. But poor Jim must leave the wine untasted. "Don't touch it," I had found the opportunity to whisper; "in your state it will make you as drunk as a fiddler." And Jim had wrung my hand with a "God bless you, Loudon!—saved ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Not Meddling Not One Slave or One Drunkard Not Seldom Ragged, Usually Patched, and Always Shabby. Not Appearing on the Appointed Wedding Day One Long Step Removed from Honest Men Patronizing If Not Contemptuous Condescension Pay the Fiddler Peace at Any Price Rose on All Sides People Became Bound by a Genuine Sentimental Attachment Plain People, Had to Furnish the Men for the Fighting Political Smear Posterity Has Done Nothing President Polk Professions Instead of Their Practices Reorganization of the Judiciary ...
— Widger's Quotations from Abraham Lincoln's Writings • David Widger
... brilliant pianist of the concert hall; the cornet-player of the "Army" ring; the blind fiddler at the corner; the mother, singing her angel-donation to sleep; Clancy, thundering forth something concerning his broken heart, whilst tailing up the stringing cattle; the canary in its cage; the magpie ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... lustre weighing 50,000 crowns; the globe of it big enough to hold a child of eight years; and the branches (GUERIDONS) of it," I forget how many feet or fathoms in extent: silver to the heart. Nay the music-balcony is of silver; wearied fiddler lays his elbow on balustrades of that precious metal. Seldom if ever was seen the like. In this superlative Saloon the Nuptial Benediction was given. [Wilhelmina, i. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Festus Clasby. "No fiddler has ever stood at my door but had the good word to say of me. Not one of them could ever say that he ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... momentary change in its expression. Gregory Hawtrey was a little casual in speech, but so far most of the young women he bestowed an epithet of that kind upon had attached no significance to it. They had wisely decided that he did not mean anything. In another moment or two the Scottish fiddler's voice broke in. ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... like hungry children crying for their bread and butter; and when the bell rang for music between the acts, the tears ran from the bassoon player's eyes in such plentiful showers, that they choked the finger-stops, and, making a spout of the instrument, poured in such torrents on the first fiddler's book, that, not seeing the overture was in two sharps, the leader of the band actually played in one flat. But the sobs and sighs of the groaning audience, and the noise of corks drawn from the smelling-bottles, prevented the mistakes between the flats and sharps being discovered. One hundred ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... of popes and kings and noblemen, and of all the male and female ruffians and vagabonds of Europe, abbe, soldier, charlatan, gamester, financier, diplomatist, viveur, philosopher, virtuoso, "chemist, fiddler, and buffoon," each of these, and all of these was Giacomo Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of mankind has precisely an opposite meaning. The woman manager (he says) economizes, saves, oppresses her household with bargains and contrivances, and looks sourly upon any pence that are cast to the fiddler for even a single jig-step on life's arid march. Wherefore her men-folk call her blessed, and praise her; and then sneak out the backdoor to see the Gilhooly Sisters do a ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... Ye of all swaying Nature feel The secret working, never-ending, And, from her lowest depths up-tending, E'en now her living trace doth steal. If sudden cramps your limbs surprise, If all uncanny seem the spot— There dig and delve, but dally not! There lies the fiddler, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... fact that magnetism is by no means confined to those who have finely trained intellects or who have achieved great reputations. Some vaudeville buffoon or some gypsy fiddler may have more attractive power than the virtuoso who had spent years in developing his mind and his technic. The average virtuoso thinks far more of his "geist," his "talent" (or as Emerson would have it, "the shadow of the soul—the otherwise") than he does of his technic, or his ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... upon a time, ever so many thowsand years ago, before there was not no Lord Mares, nor no Shirryffs, nor not ewen no Aldermen, a Gent of the name of Horfay lived in Grease. He was the werry grandest Fiddler of his time, a regler JOEY KIM. Well, he married a werry bewtiful wife, of the name of Yourridisee, and they was both werry appy, till one day, as she was a having a run in a field, a norrid serpent ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... me alone for that much," said Murtough. "I have engaged every piper and fiddler within twenty miles round, and divil a screech of a chanter[19] or a scrape of catcut Scatterbrain can have for love or ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... more by "blood" than "brains." Suppose he has received presentation copies of works of poetical rivals. This will give an opportunity for introducing contemporary biographical sketches, varying from three lines to half a column. Know his house, too—once occupied by a foreign fiddler, next a Cabinet Minister, lastly, a successful artist, hints (if required) for scenes on the Continent, in Parliament, and the Royal Academy. Wife and children. Domestic scene—good for two-thirds. Wife ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Dec. 20, 1890 • Various
... stop here," cried Hugh; "Mr. Toil will never dare to show his face where there is a fiddler, and where people are ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... great negro with a flaming firepot entered the room. His entry brought applause; but he was a common quack of a performer at the beginning, for he made pretence to eat the fire, and to bring it up again from his vitals. Then, to some wild music from a fiddler, he bound coils of the flaming stuff about his head; and, the lamps being lowered, he gave us a weird picture of a man dancing, all circled with flame; working himself up until I recalled pictures of the dervishes I had seen in the old quarter of Cairo. It was an extraordinary exhibition, ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... more beautiful,' said Claude, 'than the two first groups, the fiddler, and then the bride with the ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... rumoured since Friday that there was a fiddler aboard, who lay sick and unmelodious in Steerage No. 1; and on the Monday forenoon, as I came down the companion, I was saluted by something in Strathspey time. A white-faced Orpheus was cheerily playing to an audience of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Mistress Mary," in her pretty blue dress, tripped along with "Simple Simon" staring about him like a blockhead. The fine lady left her horse to dance with "Bobby Shafto" till every bell on her slippers tinkled its tongue out. "Bo-Peep" and a jolly fiddler skipped gayly up and down. "Miss Muffet" took the big spider for her partner, and made his many legs fly about in the wildest way. The little wife got out of the wheelbarrow to help "Boy Blue" along, and Molly, with the frying-pan over her shoulder, led off splendidly ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... days, these homely maidens never sported hoops. But she was, nevertheless, a heroine of the Amazonian species. She tripped up Pat Morgan, and laid that athlete suddenly on his back, upon the grass plot before the hall door, to his eternal disgrace, when he 'offered' to kiss her, while the fiddler and tambourine-man were playing. She used to wring big boys by the ears; overawe fishwives with her voluble invective; put dangerous dogs to rout with sticks and stones, and evince, in all emergencies, an adventurous spirit ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... of Devonshire extraction. His mother had kept the pleasantest public-house in town, and at her death Bill succeeded to her property and popularity. All the young ladies in the neighbourhood of Fiddler's Row, where he resided, set their caps at him: all the most fashionable prigs, or tobymen, sought to get him into their set; and the most crack blowen in London would have given her ears at any time for ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Chronicle, A Story of Life in Texas, 1916. Cranfill was a lot of things besides a Baptist preacher—trail driver, fiddler, publisher, ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... by a vile faction. The rank, wealth, and independence of Ballinafad are all ranged under the banner of Figsby and freedom. A party of Griggles' voters have just marched into the town, preceded by a piper and a blind fiddler, playing the most obnoxious tunes. A barrel of beer has been broached at Griggles' committee-rooms. We are all in a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... Thereupon the fiddler taking his bow and shouldering his fiddle, struck up in first-rate style the glorious tune, which I had so often heard with rapture in the days of my boyhood in the barrack-yard of Clonmel; whilst I, walking by his side as he stumped along, caused the welkin to resound with the words, ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... a blind fiddler, in Islay, who told the story of Conall, as it had been handed down by tradition from generation to generation; just as thousands of years before the story of Odysseus and Polyphemos was told by Greek bards to ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... shapes again, and they walked on the whole night until daybreak. Then the maiden changed herself into a beautiful flower which stood in the midst of a briar hedge, and her sweetheart Roland into a fiddler. It was not long before the witch came striding up towards them, and said to the musician: 'Dear musician, may I pluck that beautiful flower for myself?' 'Oh, yes,' he replied, 'I will play to you while you do it.' As she was hastily creeping into the hedge and was just going to pluck the flower, ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... had watched them awhile she started up, spread her skirts in a sweeping courtesy, and began to dance a gavotte. The fiddler changed his tune, and the girls rested and watched her. Alternately swift and languid, with the changes of the movement, she saluted backward to the floor, or spun on the tips of rapid feet. I had seen her dance many times, but never with such ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Party" will surely recall some moonlight walk home with a boyhood sweetheart along a maple-shaded lane, when "on your arm a soft hand rested," and "Money Musk" will carry you back to a lantern-lit barn floor with one fiddler perched on a pile of meal bags; and how delightful it was to clasp that same sweet girl's waist when "balance and swing" came echoing from ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... and the Ladies, and the Honourables to herself. Honourables? Damn Honourables. I am a plain British merchant I am, and could buy the beggarly hounds over and over. Lords, indeed!—why, at one of her swarreys I saw one of 'em speak to a dam fiddler—a fellar I despise. And they won't come to Russell Square, won't they? Why, I'll lay my life I've got a better glass of wine, and pay a better figure for it, and can show a handsomer service of silver, and can lay a better dinner on my mahogany, than ever they see ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... some of the clear Britishers call him—" laughed Heliobas, putting on his overcoat as he spoke; "the 'Spanish fiddler,' as the crabbed musical critics define him when they want to be contemptuous, which they do pretty often. These, together with the literary 'oracles,' have their special cliques, —their little chalked out circles, in which they, like tranced geese, stand ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Wedding.—Dean Swift being in the country, on a visit to Dr. Sheridan, they were informed that a beggar's wedding was about to be celebrated. Sheridan played well upon the violin; Swift therefore proposed that he should go to the place where the ceremony was to be performed, disguised as a blind fiddler, while he attended him as his man. Thus accoutred they set out, and were received by the jovial crew with great acclamation. They had plenty of good cheer, and never was a more joyous wedding seen. All was mirth and frolic; the beggars ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... to get music for both round and square dances at the same time, but Old Joe, a fiddler ever since the—Custer's battle, was it?—would strike one bar in waltz time and the next in rhythm to the "allemande left" of the square dances, and we got along beautifully. Some of the homesteaders helped out with guitars; a few ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... holiday dress with flowers in their hats, a fiddler in the lead. They carry a keg of home-brewed beer and a smaller keg of gin, both decorated with greens which are placed on the table. They help themselves to glasses and drink. Then they sing and dance a country dance to the melody of "There came two ladies ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... horrendas adversus Christum filium Dei blasphemias evomuit. Verum cum virtute verbi Dei a parocho victus esset, intolerabili post se relicto foetore abiit." Splendidly dressed, with two companions, he frequented an honest man's house at Rothenberg. He brought with him a piper or fiddler, and contrived feasts and dances under pretext of wooing the goodman's daughter. He boasted that he was a foreign nobleman of immense wealth, and, for a time, was as successful as an Italian courier has been ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Wilhelm of Prussia and other princes to the great nobleman Count Wenzel von Trautmannsdorf, the generous and lavish host became sorely perplexed how to provide George Stezitzky, a splendid violinist, with a suitable instrument. At this point he opportunely heard that there was an old fiddler in the court who begged permission to play before the august company. The request being granted, the musician commenced playing, and immediately sent princes and nobles into raptures over the tones of his violin. The count ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... legend of King Arthur, and Chevy Chase too, of which even your fellow-sinner Sidney cannot deny that every time he hears it even from a blind fiddler it stirs his heart like a trumpet-blast. Speak well of the bridge that carries you over, man! Did you find your Redcross Knight in Virgil, or such a dame as Una in old Ovid? No more than you did your Pater and Credo, you renegado baptized ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... his life. "I was born in Virginny," said he, holding on the rim of a slouchy felt hat, and raising it at every inquiry. "Massa sold me, fore I was old 'nuff to know my mudder, to a preacher man in Florida. Bimeby massa die, and missus, she had a musical turn o' mind, and swapped me off for a fiddler; but de people all got de laf on de ole 'oman, for in two or free months the old fiddler died, and she lost us both," and ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... she could not have ballrooms of gray and rose and crystal, she wanted to be swinging across a puncheon-floor with a dancing fiddler. This smug in-between town, which had exchanged "Money Musk" for phonographs grinding out ragtime, it was neither the heroic old nor the sophisticated new. Couldn't she somehow, some yet unimagined how, turn it ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... which will reach us, it should seem, in translation, via America—she had looked over two or three proofs of the work in the press, and Chorley was anxious to know something about its character. The title, she said, was capital—'Only a Fiddler!'—and she enlarged on that word, 'Only,' and its significance, so put: and I quite agreed with her for several minutes, till first one reminiscence flitted to me, then another and at last I was obliged to stop my praises and say 'but, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... rapid motion of the feet, no lively expression of the countenance; but with a slow, regular, up-and-down motion, they stalk through the figure with extreme gravity. They seemed to enjoy it amazingly, however, and scarcely allowed the poor fiddler a moment's rest during the ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... and joined the three at the bar. With the advent of Burning Daylight the whole place became suddenly brighter and cheerier. The barkeepers were active. Voices were raised. Somebody laughed. And when the fiddler, peering into the front room, remarked to the pianist, "It's Burning Daylight," the waltz-time perceptibly quickened, and the dancers, catching the contagion, began to whirl about as if they really enjoyed it. It was known to them of old time ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... and Miriam came too soon. Joseph was dead, his wife and children starving. Elaine was married and soon to have a child. You dreamed last night of fiddler-crabs with fiddles; They played a buzzing melody, and ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... be admitted that his blood is a frightful mixture!" said Mrs. Cadwallader. "The Casaubon cuttle-fish fluid to begin with, and then a rebellious Polish fiddler or dancing-master, was it?—and then ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... "'A Impressario is a fiddler,' says Boggs; 'I cuts the trail of one in the States once, ropes him up, an' we has a shore ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... cruel hardship, war, sickness, hunger, and then, besides, the faith, the kindliness, the light-heartedness that had saved them through it all. There were tunes that every man and woman in Ireland knows—tunes that you know—old airs that every Irish fiddler or piper or singer learns from the older ones, that the oldest ones of all learned, they say, from the fairies. And under all the music, whether grave or gay, there went a strain of grief, sometimes almost harsh ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost
... mantle, declaiming d—d bad Alexandrine verses on the spur of the moment; while Master Jock himself had shouldered a fiddle (he always carried one about with him wherever he went), and was dashing off one friss-magyar after another with all the grace and dexterity of a professional gipsy fiddler, at the same time making the two little peasant girls dance in front of him with ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... our ways, the harp and violin sounds growing fainter as we receded, till they were like the buzzing of bees in drying clover, and the twilight grew rosier brown. I never met Mat Woods again, though I often heard of his fame as a fiddler. Whether my Anglo-Indian friend found the fortune so vaguely predicted is to me as yet unknown. But I believe that the prediction encouraged him. That there are evils in palmistry, and sin in card-drawing, ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... was very old, and nothing seemed alive but the fiddles in the gallery—indeed, after the "Penny Magazine" had made us acquainted with the Nibelung, Jaquey took to calling Sisson, Folker the mighty fiddler, so determined ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to Indianapolis, and thence by "stages," waggons, or on horseback through a very dismal country in gloomy winter into the interior of the State. I can remember vast marshy fields with millions of fiddler crabs scuttling over them, and more mud than I had ever seen in my life. The village streets were six inches deep in soft mud up to the doors and floors of the houses. At last we reached our journey's end at a large log-house on a ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... pulled up at old Collins', Quite a bunch was there before, You could hear the fiddler calling, And the scraping on the floor. Through the dingy sodhouse window Gleamed a sickly yellow light, Where I helped you from the wagon, Holding you so loving tight. Then they called out, "Choose your pardners, ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... that Mary Simmons says she gave ten thousand dollars and Josie Fiddler says it was three hundred,—so you ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... careless expression of glee, animated at present, when he was exercising for his own pleasure the arts which he usually practised for bread,—all announced one of those peripatetic followers of Orpheus whom the vulgar call a strolling fiddler. Gazing more attentively, I easily discovered that though the poor musician's eyes were open, their sense was shut, and that the ecstasy with which he turned them up to heaven only derived its apparent expression from his own internal emotions, ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... cannot wield a baton without looking affected. And at one of the Colonel's Clubs in town, only five years back, an English musical composer, who had not then made his money—now by the mystery of events knighted!—had been (he makes now fifteen thousand a year) black-balled. 'Fiddler? no; can't admit a Fiddler to associate on equal terms with gentlemen.' Only five years back: and at present we are having the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... everyone: for Mr. Elliot, who was left with the impression that people were apt to be engaged when asked to meet him; for the Jowetts, who now knew that they had received a "fiddler's bidding," and for Mr. Jackson, who felt that he was only there because nobody else ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... really go into the garden for? Be so good as to confess to me: you were not unwell! You did not go only into the garden! you went into the wood, and you remained a long time there! I saw it! You made a little visit to the handsome woman while the fiddler was here, did you not? I do not ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... wilderness to all the dancers. Those old-time country fiddlers—all of them, black or white—how wonderful they were! They have always been the wonder and the despair of all musicians who have played by rule and note. The very way that the country fiddler held his fiddle against his chest and never against his shoulder like the trained musician! The very way that the country fiddler grasped his bow, firmly and squarely in the middle, and never lightly at the end like a trained musician! The very way that he let go and went off and ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... resembles the Danish ballad of Ribolt, was taken down from the recitation of an old fiddler in Northumberland: in one verse there is an hiatus, owing to the failure of the reciter's memory. The refrain should be repeated in ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... the woods had impressed upon him that a good cook and a fiddler will do more to keep men contented than high wages and easy work. So his protection of the cripple was not entirely disinterested. But his imagination persisted in occupying itself with the boy. What ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... have to introduce is Mr Seagrove. He is slightly made, with marked features full of intelligence. He has been brought up to the bar; and has every qualification but application. He has never had a brief, nor has he a chance of one. He is the fiddler of the company, and he has locked up his chambers and come, by invitation of his lordship, to play on board ...
— The Three Cutters • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Abbey during Dean Stanley's time, and afterwards the Temple Church, as may be gathered from his Short Study on the Templars. In Devonshire he frequented an old-fashioned church where stringed instruments were still played, and was much delighted with the remark of a fiddler which he overheard. "Who is the King of glory?" had been given out as the anthem. While the fiddles were tuning up a voice was heard to say: "Hand us up the rosin, Tom; us'it soon tell them who's the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... votaries for their own. As the reverend brother thundered out his denunciations of the ungodly goddess he cast his eyes often in the direction of the leading dancer, and from her they would wander to the small fiddler who sat beside the tall hat in a back pew. But somehow neither Lily nor Apollo seemed in the least conscious of any personal appeal in his glance, and when finally the question of the Christmas ball was put to vote, they both rose and unequivocally voted for it. So, for that matter, did so large ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... palm off upon most laymen as a Rembrandt; and close by, you saw the white head of John Clerk, of Eldin, that country gentleman who, playing with pieces of cork on his own dining-table, invented modern naval warfare. There was that portrait of Neil Gow, to sit for which the old fiddler walked daily through the streets of Edinburgh arm in arm with the Duke of Athole. There was good Harry Erskine, with his satirical nose and upper lip, and his mouth just open for a witticism to pop out; Hutton the geologist, in quakerish raiment, and looking altogether ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of story-books! What kind of a business in life, what manner of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler." ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... board them, of course, and we have to board their horses, as most of the shearers travel on horseback. But the feed of a horse isn't of much consequence, as we simply turn him into the paddock and let him graze there. Sometimes we hire a fiddler to play for the men while they are at work in the shearing house, and also in the evening, when they are off duty. Sometimes a gang of shearers brings along its own cook. They pay the cook's wages themselves, but the employer supplies the material out of which the ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... which sloped to the farm! As she ran down hill, she could hear the sound of music and the ring of laughter. The Grand Plough supper, the finale of the day's work and feasting, was evidently in full swing. When she reached the house she crept up to one of the windows and peered in. The hired fiddler and man with the flute and the man with the "serpent" sat on the jonquiere. The kitchen was full of people, eating and drinking round a long table covered with great pieces of meat ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... the oft repeated anecdote of Paganini's playing with a light reed-stem, and I remember having seen at Christmas festivities in country homesteads, the village fiddler playing a brisk old-time tune with the long stem of his clay pipe; also, quite recently, I read an account of an "artiste" in the States who charmed his enlightened audiences with his performances on the violin by using a variety of heterogeneous objects in lieu of ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... better, pecuniarily, for their hosts. The charge for admission to the penny wedding (practically to the feast that followed it) varied in different districts, but with us it was generally a shilling. Perhaps the penny extra to the fiddler accounts for the name penny wedding. The ceremony having been gone through in the bride's house, there was an adjournment to a barn or other convenient place of meeting, where was held the nuptial feast; long ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... a farmer, pursuing agriculture at Ratwood in Sussex, Ipswich, Fairsted in Essex, Norwich, and other places; that he was not successful, and had to betake himself to other occupations, such as those of a chorister, fiddler, &c.; and that, finally, he died a poor man in London in the year 1580. Tusser has left only one work, published in 1557, entitled 'A Hundred Good Points of Husbandrie,' written in simple but sometimes strong verse. It is our first, and ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... but the entrails are unfavourable; and the victim is without a heart. He prepares to encounter the invader. A young captain of the guard,—the son of Maria Antoinette by Apollo,—in the shape of a fiddler, rushes in to tell him that Napoleon is approaching with a vast army. The royal forces are drawn out for battle. Full catalogues are given of the regiments on both sides; ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and there will be just that number invited. The girls are to come in the afternoon and bring their sewing. There will be nine. And eight young men," laughing—"boys that we know and have gone sledding with. They are to come to tea at seven sharp. Cousin Morris is to bring his black fiddler Joe, and we are going to dance, and play forfeits, and have ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... The little fiddler came forward and drawing his instrument from under his arm, proceeded to scrape the strings. He had on a pair of moss trousers, and his coat was a yellow gorse flower. His feet were clad in shoes made of beetles' wings, which always kept bright, as if polished ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... Auld Kirk, where Tam o' Shanter's witches danced, and where Burns's father lies buried. There was peace, too, where the Brig o' Doon arched its camel-back over a clear brown, rippling stream. There, through the singing of the water, through the playing of an old blind fiddler scraping the tune of "Annie Laurie," I could hear the true Burns song, the music of his thoughts sweetly ringing on, to keep the world young, as the bright water leaps on forever to give its jewels ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to beg, and once when she was not able to do it, she had sate for a whole day under a bridge and wept. I have drawn her character in two different aspects, in old Dominica, in the Improvisatore, and in the mother of Christian, in Only a Fiddler. ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... however, equally plain that an alliance with a foreign fiddler was certain to shock British respectability. It is the old story of the quarrel between Philistia and Bohemia. Nor was respectability without much to say for itself. Piozzi was a Catholic as well ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... These people were highly pleased with the treatment they received; and, having partaken of some refreshment in the cabin, they danced on the deck with the sailors, to the animating strains of a Shetland fiddler. Two of the women were daughters of a Danish resident, by an Esquimaux woman: one of the men was the son of a Dane; and they were all of the colour of Mulattoes. After the dance, coffee was served; and, at eight o'clock, the party ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... belief that it is tracery work of wood. We ascended the rough stone steps through a winding stair to the turrets, where we had such a view of the surrounding country, as can be obtained from no other place. On the top of the centre and highest turret, is a grotesque figure of a fiddler; rather a strange looking object, we thought, to occupy the most elevated pinnacle on the house of God. All dwellings in the neighbourhood appear like so many dwarfs couching at the feet of the Minster; while ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... refreshed themselves, he went to see the city, and was beheld of everybody there with great admiration; for the people of Paris are so sottish, so badot, so foolish and fond by nature, that a juggler, a carrier of indulgences, a sumpter-horse, or mule with cymbals or tinkling bells, a blind fiddler in the middle of a cross lane, shall draw a greater confluence of people together than an evangelical preacher. And they pressed so hard upon him that he was constrained to rest himself upon the towers of Our Lady's Church. At which place, seeing so many about him, he said with a loud voice, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Abe for more'n twenty year, and in all that endurin' time he's stuck as close to shore as a fiddler. With all his bold talk about ships and sailin', I tell you he ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... (in archway) Christie, tell the Squire that I have brought two men with me—young Rob Johns, the fiddler's son, and ...
— The Squire - An Original Comedy in Three Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... same tale is told of the fiddler of Brandenberg. The children were led to the Marienberg, which opened upon them ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... occurrence at Sir Robert's table) takes up his fiddle, strikes up a tune and dances off, the patriots dancing after him. But even this is not all. "Sir," says the author, "every one of these patriots have a hole in their pockets as Mr Quidam the fiddler there knows; so that he intends to make them dance 'till all the money is fall'n through, which he will pick up again and so not lose one halfpenny by his generosity...." We may suppose that the final scene lost nothing in breadth by the acting of Quidam; and ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... but not serious, in the broad sunlight opposite the fruit-shop; the pink spider of a hand beats the guitar, the little squat hand, with a brass-and-turquoise ring, forces the reluctant flute, and the fiddler's arm tries to saw ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... of nightly occurrence. Not the brilliant and generous festivals of the olden days of Richmond, but joyous and gay assemblages of a hundred young people, who danced as though the music of shells had never replaced that of the old negro fiddler—who chatted and laughed as if there were no to-morrow, with its certain skirmish, and its possible blanket for winding-sheet. For the beaux at these gatherings were not only the officers on leave from Petersburg; the lines drawn close to the city furnished many ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... she stood up for dancing, her steps were so complete The music nearly kill'd itself to listen to her feet; The fiddler moaned his blindness, he heard her so much praised, But bless'd his luck to not be deaf when once her ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... of the last note died away, when "Shout, shout, the devil's about," was heard from a stentorian voice. Above the peals of laughter with which the words were received, rose Jake's voice, "Come on, ole fiddler, play somefin a nigger kin kick up his heels to; what's de use of singing after dat fashion; ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... dance must have an end; even the stanchest mountain fiddler will reach at last his limit of endurance and must needs be refreshed and fed. There was a sudden significant flourish of frisky bowing, now up and again down, enlisting every resonant capacity of horsehair and catgut; the violins ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... to have been called Out of Paganini—founded upon that distinguished fiddler's life, although (as the Author says) "it is necessarily speculative ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... corner of the vaulted room sat a fiddler and a fine-featured gipsy-girl with a zither; their instruments lay in their laps, and they seemed to be looking about them with an air ...
— Immensee • Theodore W. Storm
... nick-named Vermichel, formerly violinist in the Bourgogne regiment, was occupied, during the Restoration, with the various callings of fiddler, door-keeper of the Hotel de Ville, drum-beater of Soulanges, jailer of the local prison, and finally bailiff's deputy in the service of Brunet. He was intimate friend of Fourchon, with whom he was in the habit of getting on sprees, and whose hatred for ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... that his son and daughter and I should act a charade. Napier was the audience, and Marryat himself the orchestra - that is, he played on his fiddle such tunes as a ship's fiddler or piper plays to the heaving of the anchor, or for hoisting in cargo. Everyone was in romping spirits, and notwithstanding the cheery Captain's signs of fatigue and worn looks, which he evidently strove to conceal, the evening had all the freshness ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... too weak to struggle, being enfeebled through debauchery. "Oh, ye must not attempt to take your baubles with you," said the watchman, observing them; "ye must leave behind your pots and dishes, your minions, and all other things, and then hasten on." "How shall we live?" asked the fiddler, who would have been through long since but that he feared to smash his fiddle. "Ye must trust the king's promise to send after you as many of these things as will do you good," said the watchman. This made them all prick their ears, "Oh, oh!" said ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... who has to fork out—for this poor devil here will have to pay the fiddler, since it is ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... of your partner in the dance of life; for, as Mahomet used to say, in his jocular moods, 'those who will dance must pay the fiddler.' To be tied, forever, for better, for worse, to such a —— as Amina Ghoul, is to be transformed in one's whole nature. It is the transmigration of a soul from amiability to peevishness, from activity to discouragement, from love to hate, and from high-souled sentiment ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... at one end, and stalls in the corners for the sale of gingerbreads and gimcracks. The grass under it was trodden flat, and in patches the earth was bare and wet beneath the trapesing feet of the people. They were a mixed and curious company. In a ring that was cleared by an athletic plowman the fiddler-postman of Newlands, Tom o' Dint, was seated on a tub turned bottom up. He was a little man with bowed legs and ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... well. And for diversion went farther into the woods to hear a fiddler and to have him teach me the art which fled my dull fingers and the unwieldy bow. And this fiddler! His curly hair, always wet from his lustrations for the evening meal; his cud of tobacco; his racy locutions; his happy and contented spirit; and his merry wife and ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... town.—That monsieur the king knows this. That we undertake to guard our people against inconveniences, larcenies and pillage.—That such is our will, by our Lady!—That in addition, it suits us not that any fiddler, barber, or any soldier varlet should be clad like a prince, in velvet, cloth of silk, and rings of gold.—That these vanities are hateful to God.—That we, who are gentlemen, content ourselves with a doublet of cloth at sixteen ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... come, Johnny. There's no get out of it. Here's Jim Mason with me, and we've got orders to stun you and pack you if you show fight. The blessed fiddler from Mudgee didn't turn up. Dave Regan burst his concertina, and ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... flitting shadow, had rounded one vat and was that much closer to the industrious fiddler on the floor. By some weird magic of its own the Hoobat was calling ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... yon street-fiddler plies: She told me 'twas the same She'd heard from the trumpets, when the Allies ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... a' dry wi' the drinkin' o't, We're a' dry wi' the drinkin' o't. The minister kissed the fiddler's wife, And he ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... po' this winter, and Ah wish you would pardon mah old man. He is a fiddler same as you is, and ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... turn he never meant. Whoe'er excels in what we prize, Appears a hero in our eyes; Each girl, when pleased with what is taught, Will have the teacher in her thought. When miss delights in her spinet, A fiddler may a fortune get; A blockhead, with melodious voice, In boarding-schools may have his choice: And oft the dancing-master's art Climbs from the toe to touch the heart. In learning let a nymph delight, The pedant gets a mistress by't. ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... get better," said Billy Mustard, who was a great favourite with the men from the fact that he was famous as a fiddler, and could rattle off anything from "Money Musk" up to "The Triumph;" and as to hornpipes, the somethingth said there wasn't a man in the service who could touch him. Billy Mustard had won the hearts of the sailors, ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... chamber, where every movement of the day and every change of public passion whispered itself into rhyme or quaint saying. By the time he had grown to manhood he was the admitted rector of all the ballad-mongers of the Liberties. Madden, the weaver, Kearney, the blind fiddler from Wicklow, Martin from Meath, M'Bride from heaven knows where, and that M'Grane, who in after days, when the true Moran was no more, strutted in borrowed plumes, or rather in borrowed rags, and gave out that there had never ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... intended it should be. This tendency to take an ell in lieu of the stipulated inch was illustrated as early as 1705, when Lieut. Thomson, belonging to the Lickfield, chancing to meet one Richard Bullard, fiddler, "persuaded him to go as far as Woolwich with him, to play a tune or two to him and some friends who had a mind to dance, saying he would pay him for it"—which he did, when tired of dancing, by handing him over to the press-gang. ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... The Story of a Street Arab. Paul the Peddler; or, The Adventures of a Young Street Merchant. Phil the Fiddler; or, The Young Street Musician. Slow and Sure; or, From the Sidewalk to ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... traces, which have never been erased. To this hour, we may see them in the confirmed prejudices of writers like Mr. Croker and Lord Macaulay, who, agreeing in little else, agree in denouncing "this miserable mesalliance" with one who figures in their pages sometimes as a music-master, sometimes as a fiddler, never by any accident in his real character of a professional singer and musician of established reputation, pleasing manners, ample means, and unimpeachable integrity. The repugnance of the daughters ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... violin with the violence of a man who has nothing else to do. I would not wish for my worst enemy to hear anything so utterly in discord with the sublime harmony of nature. If the distant notes of Roland's Horn had only filled the air with life, perhaps—but a noisy fiddler like this, who undertakes to bring to you the expression of human ideas and the phraseology of music! This Amphion, who was walking up and down the dining-room, finished by taking a seat on the window-sill, exactly in front of the monkey. Perhaps he was looking for an audience. Suddenly I saw ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... seemed that Sterzer had held the trump card in the shape of the original agreement between him and Gordon. And he hung on to it like the Old Scratch to a fiddler. Gordon and his crowd had done everything, short of murder, to get it; hired folks to steal it, and so on, because, once they DID get it, Gabe hadn't a leg to stand on—he'd have to divide equal, which wa'n't his desires, by a good sight. The Sterzer lawyers had wanted him to leave it ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... me, Miss Trent, but I knew your father well enough, and I knew you when you was a little 'un. In those days I had the "Green Man" in the Cut; your father often enough gave us a toon on his fiddle. A rare good fiddler he was, too! Give us a song now, for old ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... the floor when the other had abandoned it in defeat—that being the test of victory. At last, the girl from Dryhill reeled, and was caught by half-a-dozen arms. Her adversary, holding the floor undisputed, slowed down, and someone stopped the fiddler. Sally turned from the crowded wall, and began looking about for Samson. He was not there. Lescott had seen him leave the house a few moments before, and started over to intercept the girl, as she ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... bright, and suffering as he was, the heart in him was brave and hopeful. He was thinking of a glorious Christmas Day upon the Madawaska River three years agone; of Adam Henry, the blind fiddler; of bright, warm-hearted Pattie Chown, the belle of the ball, and the long drive home in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... ample, We need not copy from example. We're not the only persons durst 895 Attempt this province, nor the first. In northern clime a val'rous Knight Did whilom kill his bear in fght, And wound a fiddler; we have both Of these the objects of our wroth, 900 And equal fame and glory from Th' attempt of victory to come. 'Tis sung, there is a valiant Mamaluke In foreign land, yclep'd — To whom we have ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... speedy and sedate, as though I were some rack-rape that they did well to be feared of alone at night; and so came at last to the village green, where a great dance was a-foot, with torches, and a wandering fiddler to set the tune; and ale ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... such; Thus vamp'd and accoutred, with clouts, ball, and brush, He gallantly ventured his fortune to push: Vespasian[2] thus, being bespatter'd with dirt, Was omen'd to be Rome's emperor for't. But as a wise fiddler is noted, you know, To have a good couple of strings to one bow; So Hartley[3] judiciously thought it too little, To live by the sweat of his hands and his spittle: He finds out another profession as ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... were to entrust it to me I would soon make his music famous, that's sure....But I have one request to make at Salzburg, and that is that I shall not be placed among the violins where I used to be; I'll never make a fiddler. I will conduct at the clavier and accompany the arias. It would have been a good thing if I had secured a written assurance ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the poppies and wheat in her hands. Her face revealed nothing. Julius was a little melancholy. "The fairies have left us," he said. "All of a sudden, the revel is over." Then as they walked slowly homeward, he took Sophia's hand, and swayed it gently to and fro to the old fiddler's refrain,— ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... startling adventures I have heard narrated, not one made a greater impression on me than that of which Richard, the old negro fiddler, was the hero, and which ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... not always been either a boot-black or fiddler. In his youthful days he had been a house-servant, and had prided himself on his many accomplishments—his dexterity at dinners, his grace at evening parties, the ease and unconcern with which he could meet embarrassing emergencies ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... moment caught sight of Jacko, the small monkey, in a condition of mind and body that, to say the least of it, did him no credit. We are sorry to be compelled to state that Jacko was evidently and undoubtedly tipsy. Gurney said he was "as drunk as a fiddler." ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... passed off pleasantly, and as old Sanders lighted his cigar he confided to Diotti, with a braggart's assurance, that when he was a youngster he was the best fiddler for twenty miles around. "I tell you there is nothing like a fiddler to catch a petticoat," he said, with a sharp nudge of his elbow into Diotti's ribs. "When I played the Devil's Dream there wasn't a ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... with a white ribbon bow on his sleeve. Almost all the girls and young women are dressed in white or light colours; the mothers and grandmothers (the whole family turns out) in black with flowers in their bonnets. There is usually a fiddler walking ahead making most remarkable sounds on his old cracked instrument, and the younger members of the party take an occasional gallop along the road. They are generally very gay; there is much laughing, ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... afford to despise pedantry: did he meet a traveller who amused his fancy he would give him the pass-word ('the fiddler's paid,' or what not), as though the highway had not its code of morals; nor did he scruple, when it served his purpose, to rob the bunglers of his own profession. By this means, indeed, he raised the standard of the Road and warned the incompetent to ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... up literature and was a pupil of several famous masters of the 'cello. He has written upon musical subjects, notably in his volume, "The Musical Amateur", and in his delightful account of his musical experiences in the Army, "Fiddler's Luck", 1920. He is also the author of several books of travel, such as "Romantic Germany", and "Romantic America", but it was with his poem, "Scum o' the Earth", published in one of the magazines in 1912, that he first came into prominence as a poet. ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... her experiences abroad. She had not liked Europe—being quite frankly a provincial person. To Castleman County a foreigner was a strange, dark person who mixed up his consonants, and was under suspicion of being a fiddler or an opera-singer. The people she had met under her husband's charge had been socially indubitable, but still, they were foreigners, and Sylvia could never really be sure what ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... of Music.] — N. musician, artiste, performer, player, minstrel; bard &c (poet) 597; [specific types of musicians] accompanist, accordionist, instrumentalist, organist, pianist, violinist, flautist; harper, fiddler, fifer^, trumpeter, piper, drummer; catgut scraper. band, orchestral waits. vocalist, melodist; singer, warbler; songster, chaunter^, chauntress^, songstress; cantatrice^. choir, quire, chorister; chorus, chorus singer; liedertafel [G.]. nightingale, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... us back to the bitter pessimism of Stonefolds and Daily Bread; only instead of being dialogues, these stories are given in descriptive form, and for the most part in regular pentameter rime. The best of them is In the Orchestra, where the poor fiddler in the band at the cheap music-hall plays mechanically every night for his daily bread, while his heart is torn by the vulture of memory. This poem shows a firm grasp of the material; every word adds something ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... whoop, the man on the sled contradicted himself. "No, by Moses, to Dick Fiddler's old cabin up the draw. That's where Swiftwater would aim for till ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... Digging for Gold Do and Dare Facing the World Frank and Fearless Frank Hunter's Peril Frank's Campaign Helping Himself Herbert Carter's Legacy In a New World Jack's Ward Jed, the Poorhouse Boy Lester's Luck Luck and Pluck Luke Walton Only an Irish Boy Paul Prescott's Charge Paul, the Peddler Phil, the Fiddler Ragged Dick Rupert's Ambition Shifting for Himself Sink or Swim Strong and Steady Struggling Upward Tattered Tom Telegraph Boy, The Victor Vane Wait and Hope Walter Sherwood's Probation Young Bank Messenger, The Young Circus Rider Young Miner, ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... was wont to say to the little yellow fiddler, after an evening's frolic at the Interpreter's, "Davids, clear away the tables and the glasses, and play fishes-hornspikes."[55] He was a kind, affectionate creature, and his devotion to "Monsieur Johns" and "Madame Johns" ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... pools that have been left by the tide we may find a crab or two, perhaps, some jelly-fish, star-fish, and those wonderful living flowers, the sea-anemones. And then we will watch the great gulls sweeping about in the air, and if we are lucky, we may see an army of little fiddler-crabs marching along, each one with one claw in the air. We may gather sea-side diamonds; we may, perhaps, go in and bathe, and who can tell everything that we may do on the shores of ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... knee, Terry heigho, &c. Next come in was a creeping snail, Heigho, &c. With his bagpipes under his tail, Terry heigho, &c. Next came in was a neighbour's pig, Heigho, &c. 'Pray, good people, will ye play us a jig?' Terry heigho, &c. Next come in was a neighbour's hen, Heigho, &c. Took the fiddler by the wing, Terry heigho, &c. Next come in was a neighbour's duck, Heigho, &c. Swallow'd the piper, head and pluck, Terry heigho, &c. Next come in was a neighbour's cat, Heigho, &c. Took the young bride by the back, Terry heigho, &c. Misther Frog jumped ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... Exposed with hatless heads and thin-shod feet. Something, they knew, had chased their heavy sadness; And for the years to come they still may keep, As from a morning sleep, Some broken gleam of half-remembered gladness. But the wild fiddler on his feet of flame Vanished and went the secret way ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... crickets creak, and through the noonday glow, That crazy fiddler of the hot mid-year, The dry cicada plies his wiry bow In long-spun cadence, thin and dusty sere: From the green grass the small grasshoppers' din Spreads soft and silvery thin: And ever and anon a murmur steals Into mine ears of toil that moves alway, The ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
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