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More "Piano" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the consequent movement. Diminish this period of delay and you diminish the vividness of consciousness. A familiar example will make this clear. When you are learning to play a new piece of music on the piano, especially if you do not read music rapidly, you are intensely conscious of each group of notes on the page, and of each group of keys that you strike, and of the relations of the one to the other. But when you have learned the piece by heart, you think nothing of ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... afterwards the proprietor of the Opera House, London; and presided at the harpsichord in the orchestra (piano-fortes not being then known). His embellishments were so masterly, that the attention of the audience was frequently diverted from the singing to the accompaniment, to the frequent mortification of the vocal professors. ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... able manner. Typewriting, dictaphone, switchboard operating, telegraphy, osteopathy, massage, and salesmanship are to be taught to those who are fitted for these branches; and trades and occupations, including piano tuning, winding coils for armatures used in electric motors, joinery, mat and mattress making, broom and basket making, rug weaving, and shoe cobbling are to be taught to those who are not fitted for the professions. The government will send over to France at least ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... several fine dirges. The choir of St. Stephen's Church also appeared upon the platform and opened the proceedings by singing 'Come, Holy Spirit.' The choir consisted of Madame de Luzan, Mrs. Jennie Kempton, Dr. Bauos, and Herr Weinlich. Mr. H.B. Denforth presided at the piano. ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... which I have described. The only details that have been altered for the purpose of story-telling are these: The Doctor who rescued the thirty aged at Dixmude is still alive; Smith did not receive the decoration, but Hilda did; it was a candlestick on the piano of Pervyse that vibrated to shell fire; the spy continues to signal without being caught; "Pervyse," the war-baby, was not adopted by an American financier; motor ambulances were given to the Corps, not to an individual. With these exceptions, the incidents are ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... respecting my father or my mother. After that 'the bastard'—for such was the name they gave me—was soon condemned to isolation. No one would associate with me during play-time. No one would sit beside me in the school-room. At the piano lesson, the girl who played after me pretended to wipe the keyboard carefully before commencing her exercises. I struggled bravely against this unjust ostracism; but all in vain. I was so unlike these other girls in character and disposition, and I had, moreover, been ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... the drawing-room he would come in a few minutes. Smedley stepped into the dimly-lighted drawing-room accordingly, which, to his consternation, he found already had an occupant. The doctor's niece was at the piano. ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... grand piano and played Chopin's Nocturne in G major, flinging out that elaborate filigree of sound with an impetuosity and superb ABANDON which caused the ladies to exchange astonished glances behind his back. The transitions from the light and ethereal texture of melody to the simple, more concrete ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... and followed his hostess. Judge Brewster turned to chat with the banker. From the distant music room came the sound of a piano and a beautiful soprano voice. The rooms were now crowded and newcomers were arriving each minute. Servants passed in and out serving iced ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... in our conduct. We mean something, straight enough; but our failure is in expression. Just think how often you go wrong yourselves, though your spirits have a brain to play on, like the musician with a piano. Now we have to do as well as we can without any such mechanical advantage as a brain of cellular tissue"—here he suddenly took the form of a white lady with a black sack over her head, ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... sounding apparatus of the expedition on leaving Cape Columbia comprised two wooden reels of a length equal to the width of the sledge, a detachable wooden crank to go on each end of the reel, to each reel a thousand fathoms (six thousand feet) of specially made steel piano wire of a diameter .028 inches, and one fourteen-pound lead having at its lower end a small bronze clam-shell device, self-tripping when it reached the bottom, for the purpose of bringing up samples of the ocean bed. The weights of this outfit were as follows: each thousand fathoms of ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... in with a salver, which she placed on the piano, in order to set the little table properly. A beautiful napkin of damask silk lay ready. The lady of the house scolded jestingly. It would injure the polish of the piano, and what was her guest to ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... of low degree scuttled like rats and panders dashed for safety, while "owners" in princely motorcars turned almost as white as their livers as they saw their "warehouses of virtue" going up in flame. Two incidents are very vivid—the sight of a grand piano tumbling out of a five-story window and one of the aforesaid "owners" trying to remonstrate with the avengers, and having his car run into the fire. The military police tried to interfere early in the game, but only made matters worse, as they were pretty well hated by the boys as being mostly ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... the drawing-room, and found the young lady seated at the piano, on which she was strumming idly and absentmindedly, but with a touch, nevertheless, that indicated advanced excellence in the art of music. She was not dressed as one who had just risen from the dining table, but was somewhat grimly and commonly attired, looking more like a cottager's ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... And tell them I shall want the best bedroom got ready in case Mr. Newte is able to stay the night. I've done it. [She goes to piano, dashes into the "Merry Widow Waltz," or some other equally inappropriate but well-known melody, and then there enters Newte, shown in by Bennet. Newte is a cheerful person, attractively dressed in clothes suggestive of a successful bookmaker. He carries a white pot hat and tasselled cane. ...
— Fanny and the Servant Problem • Jerome K. Jerome
... chandeliers, frescoed nymphs and cupids on the walls, a regular stage and a regular orchestra. A venerable man in gray hair and spectacles saws away at the big bass; a long-haired, professor-looking person struggles laboriously with the piano; there are two violinists, a horn, a trombone, a flute and a flageolet. On the wall is a placard where we read that the price for the first consommation is fifteen sous, but that subsequent consommations will be furnished at the ordinary price. Consommation is the convenient word of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... talked to each other, joined groups which formed outside the tents, wandered through the camp, eagerly curious about their new surroundings. They found their way into the recreation huts and canteens. They shouted and cheered the performers at concerts or grouped themselves round the piano and sang their own songs. Those who had money bought food at ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... upon tea- and card-tables. The younger women on the Strang veranda glanced at one another. The girl at the piano hesitated in her light stringing of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... clearer it may be said that Arranged and Organic architecture bear much the same relation to one another that a piano bears to a violin. A piano is an instrument that does not give forth discords if one follows the rules. A violin requires absolutely an ear—an inner rectitude. It has a way of betraying the man ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... I had to play for him on the piano, and my wife, who sat nearest him, told me that here too he illustrated the impression made on him, ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... him engaged in a violent discussion with one of the Rothschilds about the early Christians' belief in demons, as shown by Tertullian and others, while Lord Middlesex, who called at half-past five, found he had captured Faure, installed him at the piano, and was inducing him to hum snatches from "Don Juan." When his dinner hour arrived, having given orders to his valet to admit no one lest he should be discovered not fasting, he hastily swallowed a few mouthfuls, fortified ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... the piano clear of all sheet music and substituted the Bliss and Sankey Gospel hymns, and Marion passed a book to each, naming a page, and instantly her full, grand voice joined Ruth's music. Very faint were the tenor and bass accompaniments; but as the first ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... side, sits the dilettante composer, Mr. Trillo; they say his name was O'Trill, and he has taken the O from the beginning, and put it at the end. I do not know how this may be. He plays well on the violoncello, and better on the piano; sings agreeably; has a talent at versemaking, and improvises a song with some felicity. He is very agreeable company in the evening, with his instruments and music-books. He maintains that the sole end of all enlightened society is to get up a good opera, and laments that ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... Valentine very seldom used his drawing-room. Sometimes pretty women came to tea with him, and he did them honour there. Sometimes musicians came. Then there was always a silent group gathered round the Steinway grand piano. For Valentine was inordinately fond of music, and played so admirably that even professionals never hurled at him a jeering "amateur!" But when Valentine was alone, or when he expected one or two men to smoke, he ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... there was a dull green hue on the walls that surely bespoke Henry Chichester's personal taste. There were bookcases, there were mezzotints, there were engravings of well-known pictures, and there were armchairs not covered with horsehair. There was also a cottage piano, severely nude. In the center of the room stood a small square table covered with a cloth and laid ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... famous pianist, a Hungarian by birth; born with a genius for music, his first efforts at composition were not successful, and it was not till he heard what Paganini made of the violin that he thought what might be made of the piano, and that he devoted himself to the culture of piano music, with the result that he not only became the first pianist himself, but produced a set of compositions that had the effect of raising the art to the highest pitch of perfection; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... came he found her entertaining four or five other farmers' daughters and a couple of young men. She was playing the piano to them and talking and laughing louder and faster than ever he had heard her in his life. He sat moody a little while and watched her uneasily, but soon took his line, and exerting his excellent social powers became the life of the party. ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... to her, for Toni was emotional, with the quick, facile emotionalism of the South; but she was no musician herself, and the grand piano in the drawing-room was silent through these sunshiny days. She had rather a talent for housekeeping, and in a smaller establishment would doubtless have been a success; but at Greenriver there was little for her to do, and she knew quite well that the housekeeper resented any interference ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... exhibition with Indian clubs by the Remarkable Strong Girl, Signorina Bettina, with piano accompaniment ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... not get in that way. No softening, no refining influence came into my life. My one pleasure even then was music. I had a passion for it. Miss Vincent, the vicar's daughter, taught me to play the piano, and I used to spend hours in the deserted drawing-room, playing what I knew, and picking out tunes by myself, while my father was shut up in his study. We had no near relation, no one who cared enough to take pity on an unruly, troublesome, ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... began to fan herself gently with the brim. Here, in the shade, bees were humming; from the house came faint notes of a piano—Fanny practising ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... of houses looked down on us from vacant windows. Our footsteps echoed like the tramp of a crowd, our lowered voices seemed to shout. In one street we came on three English soldiers who were carrying a piano out of a house and lifting it onto a hand-cart. They stopped to stare at us, and we stared back. It seemed an age since we had seen a living being! One of the soldiers scrambled into the cart and tapped ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... instrument of torture. One reason for this aversion is that, in the great majority of cases, the household instrument is not kept in tune. Probably it is not too much to say that the man who would invent a sound cottage piano which would remain in tune would do more for the improvement of the national taste in music than the largest and finest orchestra ever assembled. The constantly vitiated sense of hearing, which is brought about by the continual jangle ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... became eminent musicians. Among these were Beethoven, Hummel, Moscheles and Josef Weigl (1766-1846). Albrechtsberger died in Vienna on the 7th of March 1809. His published compositions consist of preludes, fugues and sonatas for the piano and organ, string quartets, &c.; but the greater proportion of his works, vocal and instrumental, exists only in manuscript. They are in the library of the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Probably the most valuable service he rendered to music was in his theoretical Works. In 1790 he published ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the Count Selka led her to the piano. She sat down before it, and thinking what she should sing, glanced round upon the assembly. She could not help feeling that the admiration which beamed from the faces around her was the work of her own merit, for had she neglected the great gift of nature—her voice, she could ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... from his sister telling of young Arthur's infatuation for the cheap actress, Miss Fotheringay, the story carries one along in the leisurely way of the last century. All the people are a delight, from Captain Costigan to Fowker, and from the French chef, who went to the piano for stimulus in his culinary work, to Blanche Amory and her amazing French affectations. But Pendennis is ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... husband had quite disappeared Mary went into the house, and, sitting down at the piano, ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... Europe and had written a much-talked-of novel, which she described and of which she spoke in such flattering terms that Rizal declared his identity. The confusion in names is explained by the fact that Rachal is a name well known in the Philippines as that of a popular make of piano. ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... fast with thinking that maybe Sylvia might come up, and my senses were so alert, my mind, eyes, ears so intently reaching toward her, that now I heard what was indeed a most unexpected sound: a piano. Grasping Tommy's arm I whispered this to him, and he nodded, saying in a ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... Afton among thy green braes," caroled Betty. She was picking out the accompaniment with her first finger on the Assembly Hall piano, one stormy afternoon, for the benefit of Angela and Polly. They were trying to compose a Senior class song ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... at the perfect polish of that table! It's like the finish of a rosewood piano." He touched the ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... of mine when she takes the lapel of my coat in one hand, raises the forefinger of the other, turns her head sideways like a thrush watching a wriggling worm, and says, in a voice that rises as fast as the sound a mouse makes racing up the treble of the piano keys: 'Ump! whew! Didn't I tell you so? The minute my back was turned, of course you made ducks and drakes of all your promises. Show me a "Flying Jenney," that the tip end of any idiot's little finger can spin around, and I'll christen it Edward McTwaddle ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... she knew all about what I came for; for she put out her little slim hand, that never made a loaf of bread nor held a needle, but had only fingered the leaves of Greek and Latin Lexicons, and volumes of Zoology and Ornithology, and thrummed piano-keys,—all very well in their place (don't think I depreciate them), but very bad when their place is so large that there's no room ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... Mac. It is a rule of the house that there be no papers on the table, so I possessed my soul in patience until after dinner. My cigar going well, and Mac thundering the "Soldiers' Chorus," from Faust, on the piano, I opened the paper which Bill handed to me. To be honest, I was a little startled. The chief item on the ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... piano on board, and the boys and girls often amused themselves at this, singing and playing. As there were no other passengers, they had ...
— The Rover Boys on Land and Sea - The Crusoes of Seven Islands • Arthur M. Winfield
... and she walked to the piano which was screwed athwart the deck in front of the polished mahogany sheath of the steel mainmast. It was in her mind to play some lively excerpts from the light operas then in vogue, but the secret influences of the hour were stronger than her studied intent, and, when ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... then near the Luxembourg. That was where you saw her for the first time. You remember her blue plush hat. Then we went to the Quartier des Invalides, where there was a railing on a garden, the Rue Plumet. I lived in a little back court-yard, whence I could hear her piano. That was my life. We never left each other. That lasted for nine years and some months. I was like her own father, and she was my child. I do not know whether you understand, Monsieur Pontmercy, but to go away now, never to see her again, never to speak to her again, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the Germans had done to the homes. What the Germans had done to one piano was evident. It stood in the yard of a house where grass and flowers had been trodden by horses and men. In the sport of victory the piano had been dragged out of the little drawing-room, while Fritz and Hans played and sang in the intoxication ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the way toward the saloon. As he entered and bade us be seated in the costly cushioned wicker chairs I noticed how sumptuously it was furnished, and particularly its mechanical piano, its phonograph and the splendid hardwood floor which seemed to invite one to dance in the cool breeze that floated across from one set of open windows to the other. And yet in spite of everything, there was that indefinable air of something ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... with windows reaching to heaven. There was the huge fireplace; on the mantelpiece the same reproduction, reduced, in bronze, of Fremiet's Jeanne d'Arc, between the two globe lamps of Japanese porcelain. He recognized the grand piano, the table loaded with albums, the divan, the chairs in the style of Louis XV with tapestried covers. In front of every window there were imitation Chinese vases, mounted on tripods of imitation ebony and containing sickly palms. ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... announced suddenly in her German Russian, 'music greatly loves, and herself very beautifully plays the piano, only she likes not to play the piano when she is ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... After some piano-music, the Medium said he felt no power from this 'battery,' and asked Mrs. E.D. Gillespie to take Miss Irwin's place. Hands and ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... went over to see them; Wearing my best new coat, that is now hanging up in the closet, And having frizzled my hair, like that of the other young fellows. Soon as I entered, they tittered; but that not at me, as I fancied. Minna before the piano was seated; the father was present, Hearing his daughters sing, and full of delight and good-humor. Much I could not understand of all that was said in the singing; But of Pamina I often heard, and oft of Tamino: And I, besides, could not stay there dumb; so, as soon as ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... he announced, just before they were to be served, that two had "gone by the cats"! We had, indeed, by this time attracted most of the cats in Gallipoli. They streaked through the rooms like chain lightning, and in the dead of night went galloping over the piano keyboard with sounds so blood-curdling that Suydam put his mattress on the sofa and his sleeping-bag on top of that, and, shutting himself in, defied them. The incomparable Levy was Italian by his birth and cheerfulness, Jewish on his father's ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... you must," said Sir Tancred. "But one thing I do beg of you; do not have her taught the piano—the barrel-organ if you ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... little silence, and then Mary went over to the piano and played. It was a rather welcome relief, under ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... the brow, fluent of speech, endowed with a public manner, a commanding bust and a vigorous, ingratiating smile, wielded a gavel at a little table and directed the exercises. A paper on Shakespeare's heroines was read and discussed. Selections on the piano followed. A thin woman in eye-glasses, the literary editor of the Benham Sentinel, recited "Curfew must not ring to-night," and a visitor from Wisconsin gave an exhibition in melodious whistling. In the intervals, tea, chocolate with ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... letter from the housekeeper bitterly complaining of its performance, which seems merely to have consisted of eating all the tea-cake, biting a housemaid, getting between your Grandfather's legs and upsetting him in his armchair, and, finally, when pursued, trying to obtain refuge in the grand piano. You cannot be surprised after this experience, that it has been intimated to you that if you do not take the creature yourself away at once, it will be forthwith handed over to the first policeman that passes. Yes, spite the pig's reputed intellectual gifts, we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... as Wade raised his right arm high in the air. Twenty of the men dismounted to enter the glittering doorway, while the remainder of the vigilantes waited on their horses. A few seconds after the twenty had disappeared, the music of the piano within abruptly ceased. The shrill scream of a frightened woman preceded a couple of pistol shots and the sounds of a scuffle; then, profound silence. Presently the twenty reappeared guarding a handful of prisoners, who were disarmed and hustled across the street to an empty barn, where they ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... socially; at the same time she had fine intellectual powers. She was the delight of her teachers, for she could imbibe knowledge as a sponge absorbs water. On this particular day she was at her best during a very difficult lesson at the piano from a professor who came from London. Betty had always a passionate love of music, and to-day she revelled in it. She had been learning one of Chopin's Nocturnes, and now rendered it with exquisite pathos. ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze, Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze. The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool, So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool. In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway; Then he ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... heavenly sweet, to be lulled into the sleep of death by the song of the beloved. Perhaps our dreams continue in the grave—a long, eternal, never-ending dream of Charles—till the trumpet of resurrection sounds—(rising in ecstasy) —and thenceforth and forever in his arms! (A pause; she goes to the piano and plays.) ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... music. As a child he learned to play, almost without instruction, on every kind of instrument he could find; and while yet a boy he played the flute, organ, piano, violin, guitar, and banjo, especially devoting himself to the flute in deference to his father, who feared for him the powerful fascination of the violin. For it was the violin-voice that, above all others, commanded his soul. He has ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... we were doing finely. One day we heard the boy playing the piano, and we got him a teacher. In a short time he was able to play for the smaller classes, the juniors. Then my friend Mrs. Bainbridge got him a better teacher. He improved rapidly, and now he is organist in ...
— Dave Ranney • Dave Ranney
... it to the full during the few days she was there. And one thing more, the grand piano in the music-room. The first evening of their arrival she was drawn by the far-off sounds, and Mrs. Carleton seeing it went immediately to the music-room with her. The room had no light, except from the moonbeams that stole in through two glass ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... lights and cedar festoons. The hall in the rear of the building had an excellent dancing floor. The orchestra was composed of three Mexicans—hombres—with mandolins and a guitar, and an Irish rough-neck who brought from the piano a beauty of melody that was like a memory of the Sod. The four men produced dance music that New ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... Then suddenly she recollected. She had been in the choir at school. She had sung hymns every morning at prayers. The fat German governess, an exile from the Fatherland and deeply sentimental, used to play the piano and teach the choir. There were always tears in her eyes when she played that particular tune. The girls understood that in some way it meant a great deal to her, was perhaps the tune of some national song, captured ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... benefit performance in Chicago, and induced him to play one week's engagement. Thus Ned Wayburn made his first professional appearance at Hopkins' Theatre, State Street, Chicago, being billed as "Chicago's Leading Amateur"—a singing and dancing "black-faced" comedian, doing a "ragtime piano" specialty, and dancing act. This led to other engagements. The "piano specialty," which he originated, started the "ragtime" craze. He played in and around Chicago and the middle west. He came East to New York, and was booked by the ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... the last century a pianoforte had not figured in any Royston household, but it came at the beginning of this century when Lady Wortham as she was always styled—as the daughter of Sir Thomas Hatton, Bart., and wife of Hale Wortham, Esq.—became the owner of the first piano at their house in Melbourn Street (now Mr. J. ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... serfs, whom he vaguely intended to set free. He passed hours playing with the pretty child, and even had an old French governess come to give her lessons. She taught little Natasha to dance, to play the piano, to put on the airs and graces of a little lady. So the years passed, and the old nobleman obeyed the girl's every whim, and his serfs bowed before her and kissed her hands. Gracefully and willfully she queened ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... be glad to see me, which is something; and if she does tire me with talk about the babies, why, children are better than Berlin wool. And there is always the piano. Besides, I must walk out, or I shall rust to death ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the modern piano was invented, the most wide-spread of all musical instruments, which has followed man into the wilderness of the jungle and the ice-fields of Greenland. The organ had been the first of all keyed instruments but the performer ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... bitter lot with me,' said he, 'and I must give her all the pleasure I can for it....' To make his wife happier he took up with the officials and any kind of rubbish. And they couldn't have company without giving food and drink, and they must have a piano and a fluffy little dog on the sofa—bad cess to it.... Luxury, in a word, all kinds of tricks. My lady did not stay with him long. How could she? Clay, water, cold, no vegetables, no fruit; uneducated people ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... of the house. But where should she sleep? That was now the important question. Adjoining the sitting-room was a pleasant, cozy little place, which Margaret called her music-room. In it she kept her piano, her music stand, books, and several fine plants, besides numerous other little conveniences. At the end of this room was a large closet where, at different seasons of the year, Mag hung away the articles of clothing which she and her sister did ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... house for more than it was worth, and had used the money to take those 'lessons.' I couldn't believe it for a minute. When I really understood what she'd done, I was so angry I felt like smashing both fists down on the piano keys and howling! I thought of my blue corduroy I'd given up—I was only fourteen and just crazy about clothes. Mother was sitting on the floor, scraping away at the table-leg. She got up, laid down her sandpaper, and asked Cousin Parnelia if she'd excuse us for a ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... as a little girl she had taken a papoose from a drunken squaw and brought it home for her mother to adopt. Mrs Murchison's reception of the suggested duty may be imagined, also the comments of acquaintances—a trick like that! The inevitable hour arrived when she should be instructed on the piano, and the second time the music teacher came her pupil was discovered on the roof of the house, with the ladder drawn up after her. She did not wish to learn the piano, and from that point of vantage informed her family that it was a waste of money. She would hide in the hayloft with a ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... beyond there came a crash of soft chords on the piano and David's voice rose high and sweet across the rooms. He had gone to the piano to sing for Caroline who never tired of his negro melodies and southern love songs. He also had a store of war ballads with which it delighted ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Andante is going to give us the most trouble, for it is full of expression and must be played with taste and accurately as written in the matter of forte and piano. She is very clever and learns quickly. The right hand is very good but the left utterly ruined. I can say that I often pity her when I see that she is obliged to labor till she gasps, not because she is unapt, but because she can't help it,—she is used ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... save to attempt to lift the cover from the piano, so that Lance was compelled to ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... necessity, he would never put out fire Or a lamp or candle, so strong was his feeling for it; he would not even let a brother throw fire or a smoking log from place to place, as is usual, but wanted it placed gently (piano) on the ground, out of respect for ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... appeared, and Miss Crawford seated herself on a pink rose, about the size of a Jersey cabbage, with two colossal buds, and rested her tired back against a similar group. At the first notes of the piano her watchful and smiling face relaxed and she nodded wearily in the background. It did not matter much. The young master was grave, silent, patient, conscientious. In fact, it did not matter at all. Having slept through the earlier lessons, the schoolmistress might well sleep through this. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... Bonnie House of Airlie," but the effect of that and "Carlisle Yetts," which followed, was as irresistible as the playing of the Piper of Hamelin. The beautiful clear light came into her eyes; her lips quivered with emotion; she forgot herself, rose, and crossed the room to the piano, where she asked eagerly for song after song. The sisters begged her to come and see them the next morning, when they would sing as long as ever she liked; and she promised gladly and thankfully. But on reaching the house her courage ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... literature? especially the poetic part of it. But always, instead, a parcel of dandies and ennuyees, dapper little gentlemen from abroad, who flood us with their thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, piano-songs, tinkling rhymes, the five-hundredth importation—or whimpering and crying about something, chasing one aborted conceit after another, and forever occupied in dyspeptic amours with dyspeptic women. While, current and novel, the grandest events and revolutions ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... finished the first verse, the hum of voices, which had commenced as soon as she began to sing, rose to such a pitch as almost to drown the sound of the instrument. She laboured on through about a verse and a half of the song, when she rose from the piano, and was proceeding to her ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... and foreign trade arrested, numerous German factories underwent a quick transformation. Silk-works began to turn out bandages and lint; velvet works produced materials for tents; umbrella makers took to manufacturing rain-proof cloth; the output of sewing-machine factories was changed to shrapnel; piano manufacturers became makers of cartridges. Paper producers supplied the War Office with paper-made blankets. For copper, when the supply began to grow short, nickelled iron was quickly substituted. Sugar was employed to obtain the spirit which had to take the place of ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... When I've heat enough for ol' Mrs. Johnson it's too hot for Mrs. Bracken. Mrs. Schuneman on the first floor has too much hot water an' Miss Adams on the third too little. Mrs. Rawson won't stand for Mrs. Matchan's piano an' Mrs. Matchan kicks on Mrs. Rawson's sewin' machine. Mr. Jarvis never gets his newspaper an' Mrs. Lewis al'ys gets two. Mrs. Willoughby jumps on me if a pin drops in the hall. She can't stand ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... were glimpses of a terrace, with trellises and arbors, illuminated by little colored lanterns. Brilliant chandeliers, reflected in great mirrors, lighted the apartment. On a platform of pine was a superb grand piano. In a panel of the wall, a large portrait in oil represented a man of agreeable face, in frock coat, robust, straight, symmetrical as the gavel ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... the wooden thuds of rockers. Street after street he could recall, from the square about the "depot" to the outskirts, and through them all the dusty heat, the rockers, gigglers, the rustle of a shirt-sleeved father's newspaper, and the shrill coo-ees of the younger children. Finally, the piano—for he looked back farther than the all-conquering phonograph. He heard "Nita, Juanita;" ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... College days, and so near a neighbour in later life that few letters passed between them. 'He was a true musician; not that he was a great performer on any instrument, but that he so truly appreciated all that was good and beautiful in music. He was a good performer on the piano, and could get such full harmonies out of the organ that stood in one corner of his entrance room at Little Grange as did good to the listener. Sometimes it would be a bit from one of Mozart's Masses, or from one of the finales of some one ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... began to be erratic, also. When father wanted to sit by the Student's Lamp and read his Scribner's, she would decide to hammer the Piano and do the ...
— More Fables • George Ade
... hope!" "There is no hope!" and finally "guilty" in all the cases was reported. The wife of a horrible German murderer who had strangled his employer's wife, while a female accomplice played the piano to divert her children's attention from her cries, swooned away at the news. O'Flynn's old mother went into hysterics and became quite uncontrollable in her grief when, a few minutes later the news, "Five years' penal ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... Minnie, the youngest. Well, I went last Easter, politely to pay them a visit, And I wore the new coat now hanging up in the closet, And was frizzled and curld, like all the rest of the youngsters. When I enter'd, they titter'd; but that didn't very much matter. Minnie sat at the piano, the father was present amongst them, Pleased with his daughter's singing, and quite in a jocular humour. Little could I understand of the words in the song she was singing, But I constantly heard of Pamina, and then ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... but, since the rolls were scored rather for musical effect than for church services, the pianola was suddenly found to be playing something quite different from what was being sung. All through the expedition the want of some one who could play the piano was felt, and such a man is certainly a great asset in a life so far removed from all the pleasures of civilization. As Scott wrote in The Voyage of the Discovery, where one of the officers used to play each evening: "This ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... In November, 1880, General and Mrs. Toombs celebrated their golden wedding, surrounded by their grandchildren and friends. It was a beautiful sight to see the bride of half a century with a new wedding ring upon her finger, playing the piano, while the old man of seventy essayed, like Washington, to dance the minuet. The old couple survived their three children, and lived to bless the lives of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They were fond ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... Summer and the Little Birds were Singing in the Trees" are still inexhausted, but it sadly needs a piano accompaniment—with this it would be perfect; and so the whole crowd, including Yvonne, and Celeste, and Marcelle, and the two Frenchmen, and the girl in the bicycle clothes, start for Jack Thompson's studio in the rue des Fourneaux, ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... sufferings appear as nothing. When I, in a sort of half-whisper, asked Mrs. DICKENS where her piano was, she smiled, and turned her face towards her baby, that was sitting on her knee; as much as to say, 'This little fellow has beaten the piano;' and, if what I am now writing should ever have the honour to be read by her, let it be the bearer of a renewed expression of my admiration of her conduct, and of that regard for her kind and sensible ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... increase regularly in length and diminish in height. They are connected at one end with the fibres of the auditory nerve, and Helmholtz has suggested that the waves of sound play on them, like the fingers of a performer on the keys of a piano, each separate arch corresponding to a different sound. We thus obtain a glimpse, though but a glimpse, of the manner in which perhaps we hear; but when we pass on to the senses of smell and taste, all we know is that the extreme nerve fibres terminate in certain ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... having stolen a Piano and being unable to divide it fairly without a remainder went to law about it and continued the contest as long as either one could steal a dollar to bribe the judge. When they could give no more an Honest Man came along and by a single small payment obtained a judgment and took the ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerable length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint produces too many flimsy imitators; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur, but the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad. This literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this MALADIE DE RENE, as we like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private means look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the discordant struggle, and comfortably conscious that as his residence was "detached," no obtrusive neighbor could either warn him to desist, or set up an opposition nuisance next door by constant practice on the distressingly over-popular piano. One thing very much in his favor was, that he never manifested any desire to perform in public. No one had ever heard him play, . . he pursued his favorite amusement in solitude, and was amply satisfied, if when questioned on the subject of music, he could find ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... war her chateau was occupied by a lot of officers, who got gloriously drunk and smashed up pretty well everything in the drawing-room and dining-room. One of them, with a fine sense of humour, took a piece of hard chalk and wrote on the top of her piano in large letters: Deutschland ueber alles! The crowd left the place in the morning without trying to cover their traces, and Madame B—— came in to put things to rights. The first thing she did was to get a large piece of plate ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... already hoped that he might be there. Her doubts were soon set at rest by the sight of his thin face and almost colourless beard, in the distance, as the servant opened the door of the drawing-room. Bianca was seated at the piano, and Gianluca was standing on one side of her, while Ghisleri bent over her on the other, looking at the sheet of music before her. She rose, as Veronica entered,—a queenly young figure, with a lovely, fateful face. To-day her eyes were dark and shadowy, and Veronica thought that she must have ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... Epping Forest. They are all precisely the same in plan and construction, only in the larger sizes the handles develop or evolve into shafts; and they are equally suitable, according to size, for the vending of whelks, for a hot-potato can, a piano organ, or for the conveyance of a cheery and numerous party to the Derby. Fothergill bought a medium sized "developed'' one, and also a donkey to fit; he had it painted white, picked out with green — the barrow, not the donkey — and when his arrangements were complete, stabled the ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... old lady led the way into the darkened parlour. It was small and rather stiff. As one's eyes became accustomed to the dim green light one noticed the incongruity of the furniture: the horsehair chairs and sofa, and large accountant's desk with ledgers; the large Pleyel grand piano; a bookcase, in which all the books were rare copies or priceless MSS. of old-fashioned operas; hanging against the wall an inlaid guitar and some faded laurel crowns; moreover, a fine engraving of a composer, twenty years ago the most popular man in Italy; lastly, ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... the happiest homes I have ever been in, ideal homes, where intelligence, peace, and harmony dwell, have been homes of poor people. No rich carpets covered the floors; there were no costly paintings on the walls, no piano, no library, no works of art. But there were contented minds, devoted and unselfish lives, each contributing as much as possible to the happiness of all, and endeavoring to compensate by intelligence and ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... rhapsody referred to by Mr. Butler: (The words to be used were Mosquito, Brigadier, Moon, Cathedral, Locomotive, Piano, Mountain, Candle, Lemon, Worsted, Charity, ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... quiet and softly pretty in that long parlor. The shades were down, the piano was open, the chairs were low and softly cushioned. I leaned back and closed my ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... of the red brick town of Belfast, Mrs. Dennis McCullough, daughter of the south of Ireland, gave testimony that the goodheartedness of her neighbors prevails over their prejudice even in time of crisis. Her husband, a piano merchant, has been in some seven prisons for his political activities. He had told of plank beds, of food he could not eat, of the quelling of prison outbreaks by hosing the prisoners and then letting them lie in their wet clothes on cold ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... her bright conversation and high ideals. From her I began to catch a glimpse of the nobler things of life, things that to me, being but poorly educated and in a foreign land, had been denied. She was a sweet singer and an excellent performer on the piano, and somehow when she sang I was able to understand the soul-reaching depths of ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... then, with cedah and polish it so well that laik the mirrors it will reflect her face as she walks about. Heah will be the music room. It shall have a piano made of the same rich wood. It will look as if it were built in the house. Theah shall be guitahs and mandolins. She plays the guitah a little, Cyclona, the Princess. You should see her small white hands as she fingahs the strings. I will have a low divan of many cushions ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... little Spaniard, was only three years of age when, about ten years ago, he filled with astonishment the Court of Madrid by his wonderful playing on the piano. ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... of age, a person of light color, medium size, with a prepossessing countenance and smart; she could read, write, and play on the piano. From a child, Amarian had been owned by Mrs. Elizabeth Key Scott, who resided near Braceville, but at the time of her flight she was living at Westminster, in the family of a man named "Boile," ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... clucking, and grunting in every direction as they lay in wait for him, until at last he gained the broad gravel path, at the end of which—oh, how far away they seemed!—were the three lighted windows of the drawing-room. He could see the interior quite plainly, and the group round the piano where the shaded lamp made a spot of brilliant colour. What were they all doing? Were they huddled together, waiting, watching in an agony of suspense? Nothing of the kind: it will be scarcely credited, perhaps, but this heartless domestic circle were ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... the publication of the confession Flummers minced his way into the Press Club. He wore a suit of new clothes, and although the weather was warm, he carried a silk-faced overcoat. Before any one took notice of him he put his coat and hat on the piano, and then, with ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... magnetism in a piece of steel suspended nearby, though the two objects do not actually touch, each other. An object which is electrified will by induction electrify another object situated some distance away. A note sounded on the piano, or violin, will cause a glass or vase in some distant part of the room to vibrate and "sing," under certain conditions. And, so on, in every form or phase of the manifestation of energy do we see the principle of induction in full ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... dusk deceived him— A mist with hands of mist blow down from the tree And open the door and enter and close it after? Who will say that he saw, as midnight struck Its tremulous golden twelve, a light in the window, And first heard music, as of an old piano, Music remote, as if it came from the earth, Far down; and then, in the quiet, eager voices? "... Houses grow old and die, houses have ghosts— Once in a hundred years we return, old house, And live once more." ... And then the ancient answer, In a voice not human, but more like creak of boards ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... American parents. Thirty years old. Single. People lived in Brooklyn, but they did not have anything to do with him. Piano-finisher by trade. Did not belong to the union. Was in the army one year and deserted. Out of work three months. Came to New York two months ago. Spent all his money, $50.00, in two days. Had been in the Industrial Home two weeks. Said ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... room in a boarding house. To the left is a bed, to the right a grand piano—the latter curiously out of keeping with the other cheap furnishings. The ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... play for you!" she said. "Yes, gladly. It will be merely absurd after what you heard this afternoon. I play like a hundred thousand other girls, and I like it. I'm glad when any one's willing to listen, and if you—" She stopped, checked by a sudden recollection, and laughed ruefully. "But my piano won't be here after to-night. I—I'm sending it away to-morrow. I'm afraid that if you'd like me to play to you you'd have to come ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... music for the Exposition. This he has done,—writing two compositions in fact; and their presentation has been an outstanding feature. "Hail, California," was dedicated to the Exposition. Scored for an orchestra of eighty, a military band of sixty, a chorus of 300 voices, pipe organ and piano, its first presentation was an event. The Saint-Saens Symphony in C minor (No. 3) Opus 78, composed many years ago, has become a classic during the life-time of its creator. It was one of the wonders of the Boston Symphony programmes played in Festival Hall. Its yield ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... oval Venetian mirror stood above the fireplace, and reflected duskily in its spotted depths the faint yellow and crimson of a jarful of tulips which stood among the letters and pipes and cigarettes upon the mantelpiece. A small piano occupied a corner of the room, with the score of "Don Giovanni" open ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... the way, would just show Lord Magellan the piano nobile, dismiss him at the grand staircase, and return. Lord Magellan made ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... perception of either of them visually was but vague; he had come to hear and not to see. Neither she nor Hermann had any music with them, and Hermann just glanced at the programme, which he put down on the top of the piano, which, again unusually, was open. Then without pause they began the set of German songs—Brahms, Schubert, Schumann—with which the recital opened. And for one moment, before he lost himself in the ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... out so to be, for the affair went through without a hitch. The night of October 16th I spend at Raffles's apartments. He was as calm as though nothing unusual were on hand. He sang songs, played the piano, and up to midnight was as gay and skittish as a school-boy on vacation. As twelve o'clock struck, however, he sobered down, put on his hat and coat, and, bidding me remain where I was, departed by ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... in two nights ago to have a bit of conversation with Betsy and me, and he was FRIVOLOUS. He made three jokes, and he sat down at the piano and sang some old Scotch, "My luve's like a red, red rose," and "Come under my plaidie," and "Wha's at the window? Wha? Wha?" not in the least educational, and then danced a ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... always the Belgians. I'm afraid we'll have to move the piano. Just give it a heave at the other end, will you? That'll do. Those pianola records are just the thing. No, not so near together. So. Now you see how it works. The whole thing from here ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 16, 1914 • Various
... vocal, because it is "pure music," bereft of the fictitious aids of language and of the emotional associations which are grouped about the peculiar timbre of the human voice. [64] At first the suggestion seems plausible; but on analogous grounds we might set the piano above the orchestra, because the piano gives us pure harmony and counterpoint, without the adventitious aid of variety in timbre. And it is indeed true that, for some such reason as this, musicians delight in piano-sonatas, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... their voices as they do. They have a kind of snap to the tone which they evidently think makes the children and the servants "get a move" on them. Perhaps it does, but at the same time it falls upon a family like frost upon a field of flowers. You pay three dollars to have your piano tuned, yet you train your voice to sound harsh ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... glittering, but the general effect would have been somewhat chilling had not a second large pair of folding-doors, standing wide open, and disclosing another and smaller salon, more snugly furnished, offered some relief to the eye. This room was carpeted, and therein was a piano, a couch, a chiffonniere—above all, it contained a lofty window with a crimson curtain, which, being undrawn, afforded another glimpse of the garden, through the large, clear panes, round which some leaves of ivy, some tendrils of vine ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... irretrievably damaged by fire, great holes had been burnt here and there in the flooring, cupboards and bureaus had been broken open and their contents scattered, apparently in a search for money or valuables; many small articles of value were missing, pictures were slashed and torn, poor Dona Isolda's grand piano had but one leg left and was otherwise a complete wreck, and some priceless china vases and bowls that had been the glory of the drawing-room were lying on the floor, shivered to atoms. But a little closer inspection revealed that ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... Cloud Cote, Eve's friends were patiently awaiting her return. Nolan was reading poetry aloud to himself in the roof garden, and Lieutenant Ames was laboriously picking chords on the piano, with Marie near him strumming ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... step back. I noticed something new just beside the door: a high-legged, short-keyboard piano. Then I saw that the legs were those of a table. The piano was just a box ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... spun. They had worked hard at their history and grammar, but they had also played theatre and written verses. They had stood at the kitchen stove and prepared food, but had learned, also, to play the flute and guitar, the violin and piano. They had planted cabbages and turnips, peas and beans in one garden, but they had another full of apples and pears and all kinds of berries. They had lived by themselves, and this was why so many stories and legends were ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... Owen Leath wandered into the next room, where the piano stood, and began to play among the shadows. His step-mother presently joined him, and Darrow sat alone ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... pleasantly and prettily, though quite inexpensively, furnished. To the left, at angles with the distempered wall, is a baby-grand piano; the fireplace, in which a fire is burning merrily, is on the same side, full centre. To the right of the door leading to the dining-room is a small side-table, on which there is a tray with decanter and glasses; ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... good day, he says cheerfully, putting up the shutters; and his mind is easy. But the "good days" of The Bend are over, too. The Bend itself is all but gone. Where the old pigsty stood, children dance and sing to the strumming of a cracked piano-organ propelled on wheels by an Italian and his wife. The park that has come to take the place of the slum will curtail the undertaker's profits, as it has lessened the work of the police. Murder was the fashion of ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... surrounded the piano. Jasper Quentyns was one; Hilda played the accompaniment. The four voices did ample justice to the beautiful glee—"Men were deceivers ever." The well-known words were applauded vigorously, the applause rose to an encore. ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... the pen, a second plays the piano, and a third wields a light hammer. All three use different muscles of the hand and arm. How can this use of special muscles stamp itself upon the germ-cells in such a way that the offspring will have these special muscles enlarged? Granting that external influences of environment and ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... applauded Mrs. Davis' womanly act, else blocked the yawning hole in his prognathic head with a flat-car load of compost. If Mrs. Davis is permitted to petition the King of Kings to have mercy on the miserable journalistic piano-pounder for Gotham's high-toned honk-a-tonks, certainly she may with propriety appeal to the substitute sovereign of a nation of bankrupt assassins to spare ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... over to the piano, and Larssen followed to light the candles and turn back the case of ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... with sketches in color and cartoons in black and white, the fertig!—los! period had not arrived. On the contrary, the meeting was exceedingly demure, almost dull; for a German music professor, seated at the piano on the platform, was playing one of his own compositions, which, however beautiful, was of considerable length; and his audience had relapsed into half-hushed conversation over their light cigars and tall ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... beautiful stained window at the east end, several old tombs, and a handsome-looking organ. Elfie pressed forward eagerly to look at the latter, and found to her delight that it was open. Music was her passion, and she was almost as skilful at the organ as at her piano or with her violin. ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... set into a saloon listening to that Lady that sings high up—higher than any piano can go. I've set and listened till I didn't know where I was settin'—of course I had to buy a drink, you understand, or ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... there among the ruins, histories, arithmetics, algebras and grammars. He could tread upon these with his valiant heel. A huge roll call book (ah, how well he knew it even in the darkness) lay charred and soggy near the assembly-room piano. Junk heaps had always had a fascination for Pee-wee and had yielded up some of his rarest treasures. But a school, with all its disciplinary claptrap reduced to a junk heap! He could not, even in this late hour and strange country, tear himself ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... was subject to a disturbance which would have led him to seek other lodgings, could he have hoped to find any so cheap as these. The landlady's son, a lank youth of the clerk species, was wont to amuse himself from eight to ten with practice on a piano. By dint of perseverance he had learned to strum two or three hymnal melodies popularised by American evangelists; occasionally he even added the charm of his voice, which had a pietistic nasality ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... behind the parlor curtains with Mrs. Trimmer's Roman History, and Grandmamma was sitting, looking very grave in her new black dress, with a pocket handkerchief and book in her lap, and sherry and sponge biscuits on a tray on the piano, for visitors of condolence, when Dr. Brown came in, looking very grave too, and took off one of his black gloves and shook hands. Then he took off the other, and put them both into his hat, and had a glass of sherry and a sponge biscuit, ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... certain prizes, distinctions or qualifications. No music is now too difficult for them to execute. But that is exactly what they do—they execute it: destroy its head and heart by sheer mechanical perfection. They have mastered the piano, or the organ, or the violin, or their own voice; ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... back with his lips all her protests; standing over her, he held her upon the piano-bench until by main strength and with all the force of her resentment she tore away ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... and old women call education is the custom of dissimulating natural manners, and when they have completely depraved us they say that we are well-bred. One evening my mistress begged one of the young ladies to sing. When this girl went to the piano and began to sing I recognized at once an Irish melody that I had heard in my youth, and I remembered that I also was a musician. So I merged my voice with hers, but I received some raps on the head while ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... tapestry on the walls and an old portrait built in over the mantle. The furniture is gilt, Louis XVI, covered with old crimson brocade. There is a warmth about the room, a profusion of flowers, some books and magazines. A piano in the upper left-hand corner, a window with a balcony at Left. Doors Right and Left. LOUISE and MRS. CARLEY are replacing the furniture, which has been disarranged. Out on the balcony MOLES is seen, with PHILIP and CHRISTOPHER, arranging ...
— Her Own Way - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... gent who gets ahead of that old silver tip—takin' the word from Peets in advance, sends over to Tucson for a coffin as fine as the dance-hall piano, an' it comes along in the stage ahead of Billy's mother. When she does get thar, Billy's all laid out handsome an' tranquil in the dinin'-room of the O. K. Restauraw, an' the rest of us is eatin' supper in the street. It looks selfish to go crowdin' ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... should be a well-educated and accomplished musician. This does not mean that the singer must be a capable performer on the piano or violin; yet some facility in playing the piano is of enormous benefit to the singer. A general understanding of the art of music is not necessarily dependent on the ability to play any instrument. The rudiments of music may quite well be mastered through the study of sight ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... Sundays, so that one learns without surprise that she is a strict Anglican. She lives in the neighbourhood of Cadogan Square, and has five daughters, of whom two are married, to a well-known surgeon and a minor canon respectively. The beauty of the family is Joan, who plays the piano and is considered intellectual and artistic. She spent a year at the Conservatoire in Brussels, and often uses French words in conversation. Effie, the youngest, is an adept at games, and rather alarms her mother by her habit of using slang expressions and the shortness ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... telescopes were also set up and observations of the heavens occupied the astronomically inclined for an hour or two. Thus the moons of Jupiter were made to contribute to the evening's entertainment. The piano, too, was not the instrument of torture usually found masquerading in hotel-parlors, and we finally gravitated towards it and made night hideous with our music and college songs until, to pharaphrase the poet, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... throughout by incandescent lamps, and there was even a small automatic piano worked by the electric current, on which popular airs ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... to do it, I'd like to give five or ten dollars to the child who dances. It must be a tough life, and her mother—the woman at the piano—looks ill. I wonder whatever brought them to ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... short, a woman of character. There you are, Miss Blunt, at full length,—emphatically the portrait of a lady. After tea, she gave us some music in the parlor. I confess that I was more taken with the picture of the dusky little room, lighted by the single candle on the piano, and by the effect of Miss Blunt's performance, than with its meaning. She appears to possess ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... was to be their home for perhaps a fortnight. All seemed new and strange to their wondering eyes—the dining-saloon, with its long table and fixed, crimson plush-covered chairs, that swivelled round like music-stools to allow their owners to sit down on them; the small saloon, with mirrors, piano, and books, specially reserved for the ladies instead of a drawing-room; the smoke-room for the gentlemen, and the steward's pantry. The cramped sleeping accommodation rather appalled the girls, though Cousin Clare, who was ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... just risen from his chair to go to the piano, stopped short and listened. "False alarm. Must be the doctor. One of the maids is sick." He crossed to the piano where Miriam already stood, turning over a pile of music. Having found the song for which she was searching, she took her place ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... in his work something of the passion for form and style that one finds in Flaubert and Pater, but where they are often hard, percussive, like a piano, he is soft and strong and intimate like a violin on which he plays his reading of life. Such analogies, however, have little significance, except that they indicate a ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... of all my happy days with Dulcie in the country—in the hunting field, in the gardens about her home, of afternoons spent among the books and prints and pictures in her father's quiet, book-lined library at Holt, of the evenings in the drawing-room at the piano, of hours of pleasant talk in the beautiful conservatories and on the grassy terraces, and by the lake-side below the tennis lawn. What, I thought, would life be like when at last I had her always with me, brightening my life, filling my own home—our home—with laughter and with the music ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... clustering firs of Hawkins Hill, as if it were part of the natural phenomena. At last it was completed. Then Mr. Hawkins proceeded to furnish it with an expensiveness and extravagance of outlay quite in keeping with his former idiocy. Carpets, sofas, mirrors, and finally a piano,—the only one known in the county, and brought at great expense from Sacramento,—kept curiosity at a fever-heat. More than that, there were articles and ornaments which a few married experts declared only fit for women. When the furnishing of the house was complete,—it had occupied ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... its stirring streets, which make you think that Polonius lies unburied in every house, and that you nose him as you pass the door and window-gratings. With this exclamation and remembrance, you lower yourself into one of Mr. Ensor's rocking-chairs,—twelve of which, with a rickety table and a piano, four crimson tidies and six white ones, form the furniture of the Ensor drawing-room,—you lean your head on your hand, close your eyes, and wish for a comfortable room, with a bed in it. A tolerable room you shall have; but for a bed, only a cot-bedstead with a sacking bottom,—further, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... to Mrs. Warlock. She told Mrs. Warlock that she found Harrods' a confusing place, that she had not yet visited Westminster Abbey, that her health was quite good, that she had no brothers and no sisters, that she could not play the piano, and that she was afraid that she never ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... Mrs. Penn has left town, how often you have been with her, and what passed. I need not repeat my anxiety to know how you and Madame de S. agree, and what progress you make in music, dancing, and speaking French. She promised to give you now and then a lesson on the forte-piano; is she ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... rose from the piano with unexpected suddenness remarking SOTTO VOCE that if he had known he was to play on a spinet he would have brought some Lulli with him. He was beaming all over, none the less, and soon making arrangements with other guests for a series of picnics and boating excursions—getting on swimmingly, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... and the effort made to bring him back to normality, for which purpose, some quaint and interesting devices are used. One case given is that of a little girl whose senses of sound and form were defective and who therefore could not learn her letters. These letters were pasted on the keys of a piano and she was taught to play a piece with one finger, meanwhile chanting over the names of the letters as they were struck. In this way her sense of sound was trained, she learned her letters and gained ability to learn more and faster. Abstraction may be strengthened by having ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... proceeded to the drawing-room and prepared to take out the piano. They tried it every way. The first way took a piece out of the doorpost, the second made a dint two inches deep in the piano, the third knocked over the grandfather clock, which fell with a resounding crash, breaking its glass, and incidentally a tall china plant stand that happened ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... we had time enough for such things, though we lost many a free hour in music lessons. Ludo was learning to play on the piano, but I had chosen another instrument. Among our best friends, the three fine sons of Privy-Councillor Oesterreich and others, there was a pleasant boy named Victor Rubens, whose parents were likewise friends of my mother. In the hospitable house ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the square where their house was. It was brilliantly lighted up, for Felicita was having one of her rare receptions that evening, and in another hour or two the rooms would be filled with guests. It was too early yet, and Hilda was playing on her piano in the drawing-room, the merry notes ringing out into the quiet night. There was a side door to Phebe's studio, by which she could go in and out at pleasure, and she stood at it trying to fit her latch-key ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... tuning-fork. Only those hairs which have to do with the production of sound answered to the notes of the tuning-fork, and these vibrated at the rate of five hundred and twelve vibrations per second. Other hairs vibrated to other notes, which were those of the middle octave of the piano and the next above it. Mayer also found that certain of these vibrations corresponded with the notes produced by the 'song' of the female mosquito. Consequently, when she begins to 'sing,' her tune, like the tuning-fork, sets in motion those hairs on the antennae of the male which ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... could reach him, he had closed the door and was jingling his spurs along the passage to a spiral stairway of broad concrete steps. As he left the head of the stairway, a dance-time piano measure and burst of laughter made him peep into a white morning room, flooded with sunshine. A young girl, in rose-colored kimono and boudoir cap, was at the instrument, while two others, similarly accoutered, in each other's arms, were parodying a dance never learned at dancing ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... glitter and fire in each eye, For two living coals were the symbols; His teeth were calcined, and his tongue was so dry, It rattled against them, as though you should try To play the piano in thimbles. ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... room of a quaint little house uptown, a great bronzed-faced man sat at a piano, a dead pipe between his teeth, and absently played the most difficult of Beethoven's sonatas. Though he played it divinely, the three men who sat smoking and talking in a near-by corner paid not the least attention to him. The player, it seemed, did not expect them ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... began to talk of less gruesome things. Lorrimore was a brilliant and accomplished conversationalist, and the time passed pleasantly until, as we men were lingering a little over our wine, and Miss Raven was softly playing the piano in the adjoining drawing-room, the butler came in and whispered to his master. Raven turned an astonished face ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... river. And Mitch said he thought I'd been a good brother, and that Little Billie thought so too. Ma said she just couldn't live with Little Billie gone—Myrtle and me didn't answer, somehow. And one day I heard her singin' at the piano—she and pa had joined the town troupe to sing Pinafore. She was Little Buttercup, and pa was Dick Deadeye, and so they practiced together. And I always, to this day, think of Little Billie whenever I hear any one sing "The Nightingale Sighs for the Moon's Bright Rays." These things always get ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... Mrs. Toombs celebrated their golden wedding, surrounded by their grandchildren and friends. It was a beautiful sight to see the bride of half a century with a new wedding ring upon her finger, playing the piano, while the old man of seventy essayed, like Washington, to dance the minuet. The old couple survived their three children, and lived to bless the lives of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They were ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... dears," again exclaimed Miss Pamela, "here is some money I didn't expect. Didn't I tell you, Kitty Plumstone, that Providence would send you some new music somehow? She plays on the piano, Master Ned; I really do think she is going to make quite a musician. I teach her myself, you know. I can't play any more because of the stiffness in my fingers, but Kitty can play 'Days of Absence,' and 'Come, Haste ...
— Harper's Young People, June 29, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the School below the first three Forms. Singing was taught to all the younger boys and a School Choir had been formed consisting of boys and masters. Nearly half the School learned instrumental music, chiefly the Piano, and there were one or two School Concerts given every year and in addition concerts of classical music were ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... had discovered—it is obvious that she never returned—it. We have another vivid picture of his irritation when she was waltzing in his presence at Matlock; then an account of their riding together in the country on their return to the family residence; again, of his bending over the piano as she was playing the Welsh air of "Mary Anne;" and lastly, of his overhearing her heartless speech to her maid, which first opened his eyes to the real state of affairs—"Do you think I could ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... direct percussion of a string, as in the dulcimer, piano, etc., we at once perceive a possible connection between the hammer of the one and the rod or bow of the other: the accidental colliding of the bow with the strings of its accompanying instrument would soon suggest experiments ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... malaria or despondency in my system that I have this spring. My cheeks have a delicate bloom on them like a russet apple, and my step is light and elastic. In the morning I arise from my couch and, touching a concealed spring, it becomes an upright piano. I then bathe in a low divan which contains a jointed tank. I then sing until interfered with by property owners and tax-payers who reside near by. After a light breakfast of calf's liver and custard pie I go into the reception-room and wait for people to come and feel my pulse. ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... at Rethel showed me a letter from a friend demanding "some easy chairs and a piano for his trench house," and the Major said, "I hear they have music up on the Yser, but the French are too close to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... not, but I had to make a start to get Rosey away from the piano. She's playing while Madge teaches some of the other seniors how to dance the latest step. I wish she'd hurry, I hate loosing my special bus." She glanced behind her and then ...
— Phyllis - A Twin • Dorothy Whitehill
... may be anything but simple. We walk and talk, and write or play the piano without ever thinking of a single muscle or organ. Yet we had once to learn with much effort to take each step or frame each letter. Thus actions, originally conscious and intended, easily become reflex; often repeated the brain leaves their control to the lower centres. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... course of the following years Garlan used often to come to Vienna on business, and never omitted to visit Bertha's family on such occasions. After supper it was Bertha's custom to play the piano for Garlan's entertainment, and he used to listen to her with an almost reverent attention, and would, perhaps, go on to talk of his little nephew and niece—who were both very musical—and to whom he ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... most fluid of mediums. Yet some limitation there must be to this freedom, some resistance of the medium. In great art there is the illusion of absolute freedom. The formal restraints imposed by the material—paint, black and white, marble, piano tones, or whatever it may be—are not perceived; it is as though there were a limitless margin of elbow-room between the artist's fullest utilization of form and the most that the material is innately capable of. The artist has ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... his John Drew regalia, looks even thinner and whiter than ever; but he struts around as perky and important as if he was Big Bill Edwards. First off he has to have the piano turned the other way. Then, when he goes to unlimber his music rack, it develops that a big vase of American Beauties is too near his elbow. ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... and bright eyes ran across the yard. She was followed by an old black mammy, whose anxiety for fear her charge might get her clothes soiled was plainly evident; from the parlor came the notes of an old piano, sadly out of tune, and Jud could hear the fine voice of another daughter ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... neighbour in later life that few letters passed between them. 'He was a true musician; not that he was a great performer on any instrument, but that he so truly appreciated all that was good and beautiful in music. He was a good performer on the piano, and could get such full harmonies out of the organ that stood in one corner of his entrance room at Little Grange as did good to the listener. Sometimes it would be a bit from one of Mozart's Masses, or from one of the finales of some one ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... friend found that he had twisted them enough; how many discordant scrapes gave promise of the coming harmony. How much the muslin fluttered and crumpled before Eleanor and another nymph were duly seated at the piano; how closely did that tall Apollo pack himself against the wall, with his flute, long as himself, extending high over the heads of his pretty neighbours; into how small a corner crept that round and florid little minor canon, ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... neither sing nor dance; I cannot recite verse nor play upon the piano; I am no acrobat nor leaper nor high kicker; yet I wish to go upon the stage. What shall ...
— American Fairy Tales • L. Frank Baum
... abandoned mercantile life in Sydney to return to his old haunts, where he managed his own establishment, joined farming to whaling, endowed a mission station,[1] and amazed the land by importing a black-coated tutor and a piano for his children. Moreover, the harpooners and oarsmen were not paid wages or paid in cash, but merely had a percentage of the value of a catch, and were given that chiefly in goods and rum. For this their employers charged them, perhaps, five ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... are musical should take a note on the piano enunciating the vowels in their natural order ([a], ay, ee, o, oo) on this note. Then proceed to the next note; the whole of the octave may thus be gone over. Choose an octave most consonant with the range of ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... first I've seen out here. The comic Scot vastly popular; but even more so are hideously sentimental songs all about the last bugle and death and my dead friends under the earth and eternal sleep. You know? However, they love it, and the dismal piano beats a tinny accompaniment. ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... the queen," answered the Count de Vaudreuil, who was sitting at the piano and practising a new piece of music. "The queen is the womanly Orestes: the Furies are the three royal aunts; and the serpents—pardon me, ladies—are, with the exception of yourselves, most all the ladies ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... naked walls were covered with fine paintings, in handsome frames; rich curtains were hung in the windows, and upon the floors were laid beautiful carpets.—The mirrors, sofas, chairs and cabinets were of the costliest kind; a magnificent piano was placed in the parlor, and the lady took care that the chamber which she intended to occupy was fitted up with all possible elegance and taste. A voluptuous bed, in which Venus might have revelled, was not the least attractive feature of that luxurious ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... earnestly intent upon his work of coloring the woodcuts in an odd volume of the 'Magasin Pittoresque', and wetting his brush from time to time in his mouth. The neighbors in the next apartment had a right to one-half of the balcony. Some one in there was playing upon the piano Marcailhou's Indiana Waltz, which was all the rage at that time. Any man, born about the year 1845, who does not feel the tears of homesickness rise to his eyes as he turns over the pages of an old number of the 'Magasin Pittoresque', or who hears some one play ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... of her uncle and aunt without comment. In the afternoon she did not come home from the University but went to Kate's apartment. The brother came home and after dinner played on the piano. At ten o'clock Clara started home afoot and Kate accompanied her. The two women went out of their way to sit on a bench in a park. They talked of a thousand hidden phases of life Clara had hardly dared ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... to school? Yes, and no. Our only school is one that Aunt Matilda keeps for us in the library. She teaches us to read, to write, and to draw. She can play on the piano, and has begun to teach me music. Oh! What should we ...
— The Nursery, September 1877, Vol. XXII, No. 3 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... indistinguishable from the pile of rugs amid which he sprawled by the table, and of Sir Lucien Pyne nothing was to be seen but the outstretched legs and feet which projected grotesquely from a recess. Seated, oriental fashion, upon an improvised divan near the grand piano and propped up by a number of garish cushions, Rita beheld Mrs. Sin. The long bamboo pipe had fallen from her listless fingers. Her face wore an expression of mystic rapture like that characterizing the features of some ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... expense was to be borne by herself; and Mrs. Mills therefore only offered a feeble objection when the girl arranged that the front room upstairs was to be turned out, rout seats hired, and a few articles of furniture, including the piano-forte (which, at one perilous moment, threatened to remain for the rest of its life at the turn of the staircase), transferred from the shop parlour. Bulpert announced his intention of taking charge of the musical and dramatic part of the entertainment. Bulpert ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... senses sufficiently to know where I was. The whole face of things in my room was completely changed. Flowers had been put in the china vases upon the tables—two handsome lamps, shaded with gauzes, stood upon the consoles —illustrated books, prints, and caricatures, were scattered about. A piano-forte had also, by some witchcraft, insinuated itself into a recess near the sofa—a handsome little tea service, of old Dresden china, graced a marquetry table—and a little picquet table stood most invitingly beside the fire. I had scarcely time to turn my eyes from one to the other of these new ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... large one. At its further end stood a grand piano, so placed that whoever was playing commanded a full view of the remainder of the room, and at this moment the piano-stool was occupied by Signor Baroni himself, evidently in the midst of giving a lesson to a young man who was standing at his elbow. ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... using brings a continually increasing power. This is governed by law the same as are all things in our lives, and all things in the universe about us. Every act and advancement made by the musician is in full accordance with law. No one commencing the study of music can, for example, sit down to the piano and play the piece of a master at the first effort. He must not conclude, however, nor does he conclude, that the piece of the master cannot be played by him, or, for that matter, by any one. He begins to practise the piece. The law of the mind that we have already noticed comes to his ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... House of Airlie," but the effect of that and "Carlisle Yetts," which followed, was as irresistible as the playing of the Piper of Hamelin. The beautiful clear light came into her eyes; her lips quivered with emotion; she forgot herself, rose, and crossed the room to the piano, where she asked eagerly for song after song. The sisters begged her to come and see them the next morning, when they would sing as long as ever she liked; and she promised gladly and thankfully. But on reaching the house her courage failed. We walked some time ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... my brain," she said, and began to pace about the room, up and down, up and down. Her mother watched her anxiously. Angelica closed the piano. Dr. Galbraith and the bishop came in from the dining room, and then Edith declared that driving in the open air had made her so sleepy she must ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... would learn the art of making macaroni; at Nice, the principles of making candied fruit. I never went to the opera without first buying the book of the piece, and making myself acquainted with the principal airs by picking them out on the piano ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... made no reply, and his daughter smiled contentedly as she heard him stamping about in the larder. He made but a poor meal, and then, refusing point-blank to assist Annie in moving the piano, went and smoked a very reflective pipe in ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... maid must awake to her grief! Honora would never have expected so poetical a flight from her good old governess as the suggestion, 'Play to her;' but she took it eagerly, and going to the disused piano which stood in the room began a low, soft air. The little sleeper stirred, presently raised her head, shook her hair off her ears, and after a moment, to their surprise, her first word was 'Mamma!' Honora ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... boy is all for being a porter, sir. He has got the butt-end of his father's fishing-rod, you see, and torn his handkerchief into shreds to make a tassel for his mace." Then with a sweep of the arm, "All presents, sir. He gets presents from all parts of the world. The piano is from England, but nobody plays, so it is never opened; the books are from Germany, and the bronze is from France, but the strangest thing of ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... are business offices, a pleasant reading-room with an open fire upon its hearth, and a small library adjoining. In this house is a guest-chamber where all friends of the school are made welcome, and here are the music-rooms, one containing a piano and one ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 42, No. 1, January 1888 • Various
... the business quarter of Calcutta. It was the business quarter, yet the air was gay with the dimpling of piano notes, and looking up one saw the bright sunlight fall on yellow stuccoed flats above the shops and the offices. There the pleasant north wind blew banners of muslin curtains out of wide windows, and little gardens of palms in pots showed behind the balustrades of the flat roofs whenever a ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... longer it might be before I could get a coat with tails, when I calculated how soon she would be putting up her back hair. Her eyes were as blue as I was when I thought she liked Briggs; and she had a complexion compared with which strawberries and cream were nowhere. When she was sent to the piano, to show people what the Moodle system could do in the way of a musical education, I fell into a cataleptic state and floated off upon a flood of harmony. Miss Moodle and her mits, self and lemon kids, even ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... dramatic perception, did it in fact with such earnestness that she had no time to have an eye to the gallery at all, she simply contemplated herself and her own vigorous accomplishment. When she played the piano as she frequently did, (reserving an hour for practice every day), she cared not in the smallest degree for what anybody who passed down the road outside her house might be thinking of the roulades that poured from her open window: she was ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... point. I am not a man of education. I don't know how to play the piano, and can scarcely manage a free-hand sketch of a cathedral. My Greek is shaky, and I speak French and German with an accent enough to drive a linguist mad. No, no, you take my word for it—this little ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... time, and saw no sign of me;—but now my heart beat so thickly, when I thought of him passing me in the dance, that, could I sit there still, I feared 'twould of itself betray me, and that warned me to question if the hour were not ready for the dances, and I rose and stole to the piano and sat awaiting my mother's word. But scarcely was I there when one came quietly behind me, and a head bent and almost swept my shoulder; then ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 'medicals'—both 'decent' lads enough— Hearkened the story out like gentlemen, And said the right thing—almost looked it too! Though all the while within them laughed a sea Of student mirth, which for full half an hour They stifled well, but then could hold no more, As soon their mad piano testified: While in the kitchen dinner was toward With hiss and bubble from the cooking stove, And now a laugh from John ran up the stairs, And a voice ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... last I have seen Miss Baxter face to face. There was no doubt about its being her. You would have known her at once. And how beautiful she is! She was looking up and seemed inspired, probably thinking about her part. She reminded me of that beautiful picture of St. Cecelia playing on the piano...." ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... stuffs did there, it was impossible to say; they awaited, while gratifying the eyes, a destination unknown to their owner himself; in the meantime they filled the place with their golden and silky reflections. In the centre of the room was a Roller and Blanchet "baby grand" piano in rosewood, but holding the potentialities of an orchestra in its narrow and sonorous cavity, and groaning beneath the weight of the chefs-d'oeuvre of Beethoven, Weber, Mozart, Haydn, Gretry, and Porpora. On the walls, over the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... into profound sleep, and at exactly twelve o'clock I heard a faint tapping on top of the piano, just behind Miller. "Hooray, here they are!" I exclaimed, with vast relief. "What is the matter?" I asked of "the presence." ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... he had occupied the chair for several months. He gazed about at the pictures and the odds and ends of a drawing-room in an attempt to take an interest in them. The great garlanded paper shade over the piano lamp consoled his impatience in a mild degree because he knew that Marjory had made it. He noted the clusters of cloth violets which she had pinned upon the yellow paper and he dreamed over the fact. He was able to endow this shade with certain qualities of sentiment that caused his stare ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... the eleventh week, and this movement in the sixteenth week had become as rapid and certain as a reflex. At eight months, or a year before its first attempts at speaking, the infant distinguished between a tone and a noise, as shown by its pleasure on hearing the sounds of a piano; after the first year the child found satisfaction in itself striking the piano. In the twenty-first month it danced to music, and in the twenty fourth imitated song; but it is stated on the authority of other observers that some children have been able to sing pitch correctly, and even a melody, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... very much now whenever I get a chance to. I think it is splendid and always amusing. I can play lots of little duets on the piano with Mama. ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... the fumes of latakia. Most of them were Turks in European clothes and the fez, but there were some German officers and what looked like German civilians—Army Service Corps clerks, probably, and mechanics from the Arsenal. A woman in cheap finery was tinkling at the piano, and there were several shrill females with the officers. Peter and I sat down modestly in the nearest corner, where old Kuprasso saw us and sent us coffee. A girl who looked like a Jewess came over to us and talked French, but I shook my head and ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... home for his future wife. The very tint of the walls, and the way the light falls in through the windows, would become matters of grave importance. In what pleasant spot shall her favorite chair be placed? And what picture shall hang opposite it to catch her eye the oftenest? Where is her piano to stand? What china, and glass, and silver, is she to use? Where are the softest carpets to be found for her feet to tread? In short, where is the very best and daintiest of every thing to be had, for the best and daintiest little bride ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... all circles, and the idol of his own." As his visits to his native city were few and far between, the power to see him, and especially to hear him, was a boon of magnitude. It was, indeed, a treat, when, seated at the piano, he gave voice to the glorious "Melodies" that are justly regarded as the most valuable of his legacies to mankind. I can recall that evening as vividly as if it were not a sennight old: the graceful man, small and slim in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... are very accomplished; can teach the piano, and history, and the elements of Latin; but it seems to me you have ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... bore. A bore expects you to listen to him. This man is apparently unaware whether you are listening to him or not. He is not a fool. A fool is occasionally amusing— Longrush never. No subject comes amiss to him. Whatever the topic, he has something uninteresting to say about it. He talks as a piano-organ grinds out music steadily, strenuously, tirelessly. The moment you stand or sit him down he begins, to continue ceaselessly till wheeled away in cab or omnibus to his next halting-place. As in the case of his prototype, his rollers are changed about once a month ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... Captain. "I shall lie in bed, drinking a nice hot cup of tea, and wondering whether the last crash was the kitchen chimney, or only the drawing-room piano coming down another storey. Now ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... I advise you to admire their child. She's always ill. She cries all night like a little cat. It keeps me awake. And afterward, through the day, I have mamma's piano and her scales—tra, la la la! If the music were only ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... Gap.—If you strike a piano string a single quick blow it will continue to vibrate according to its natural period. This is very much the way in which a quenched spark gap sets up oscillations in a coupled closed and open circuit. The oscillations set up in the primary circuit by a quenched spark make ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins
... were in their glory, and as soon as the breakfast things were out of the way, they prepared for a grand cooking-time. They were handy girls, though they had never heard of a cooking-school, never touched a piano, and knew nothing of embroidery beyond the samplers which hung framed in the parlor; one ornamented with a pink mourner under a blue weeping-willow, the other with this pleasing verse, each word being done in a different color, which gave the ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... reporter entered the room he found the ladies and gentlemen assembled there tripping the light fantastic toe to the music of a harp, piano, and violin. Ernestine L. Rose was president of the occasion, and gave a very interesting sketch of the life and labors of this noble man. After which they had a grand supper, and Lucy Stone replied to the toast, "Woman, coequal with man." The ladies not only danced ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... room. One day Dion found her with a volume of Tennyson; another day she was reading Shakespeare's "Henry the Fifth"; she had the "Paradiso" in hand, too, and the Greek Testament with the English text in parallel columns. In the room there was a cottage piano, and one evening, when Dion had been drilling and came back late, he heard her singing. He stood still in the hall, after shutting softly the door of the lobby, and listened to the warm and powerful voice of the woman he ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... of mist blow down from the tree And open the door and enter and close it after? Who will say that he saw, as midnight struck Its tremulous golden twelve, a light in the window, And first heard music, as of an old piano, Music remote, as if it came from the earth, Far down; and then, in the quiet, eager voices? "... Houses grow old and die, houses have ghosts— Once in a hundred years we return, old house, And live once more." ... And then the ancient answer, In a voice not human, but more like creak ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... light of tin lanterns. At least, that's the traditional thing. The actual thing is sitting around four sides of the room, giggling, whispering, looking at photograph albums, and coaxing somebody to play on the piano. The banquet is passed in the form of apples and water. I have assisted at some rural festivals where the apples were omitted. Upon the whole, I wonder our country people don't all go mad. They do go mad, a great many of them, and manage to get ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... the living-room chattering in the most lively manner. Maezli was just telling Lippo her plans for the afternoon when he should be back from school. The mother, after attending to some task, followed the children, who were standing around the piano. ...
— Maezli - A Story of the Swiss Valleys • Johanna Spyri
... and jasmine. They had spun flax, but had sung folk-songs as they spun. They had worked hard at their history and grammar, but they had also played theatre and written verses. They had stood at the kitchen stove and prepared food, but had learned, also, to play the flute and guitar, the violin and piano. They had planted cabbages and turnips, peas and beans in one garden, but they had another full of apples and pears and all kinds of berries. They had lived by themselves, and this was why so many stories and legends were stowed away in their memories. They had ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... head, in token of obedience, and as she turned back to join Lizzie, Leah Mordecai was approaching the piano, accompanied ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... come to a pair of cottages, changed from their pristine loveliness—now the "Mary Margaret Home," for old ladies. The one at 3033 P Street in my girlhood was the home of Mrs. James D. Patton, the former Jennie Coyle. She gave me piano lessons for four years, but she gave me much more! She formed a group of girls into a King's Daughters' Circle, "The Patient Workers," which met at her house on Saturday mornings when we sewed and ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... and then they bade me to their home,—a nest of a cottage, with gate and garden, hidden in London's endless rings of suburbs. I dimly recall through these years a room in cozy disorder, strewn with music—music on the floor and music on the chairs, music in the air as the master rushed to the piano now and again to make ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... in London, Margaret was alone at her piano and Lushington was announced. Unlike the majority of musicians in real fiction she had not been allowing her fingers to 'wander over the keys,' a relaxation that not seldom leads to outer darkness, ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... "Disposizione 2/5 o 1/5. Leonardo osservo probabilmente soltanto la prima" (UZIELLl).]; the second is that two third ones above are over the two third ones below [Footnote 10: terze di sotto: "Intende qui senza dubbio parlare di foglie decussate, in cui il terzo verticello e nel piano del primo" (UZIELLI).]; and the third way is that the third above is over the third below [Footnote 11: 3a ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... who played well on the piano, and was very ready to weep over any fictitious tale of suffering. I was present when one of her slaves lay on the floor in a high fever, and we feared she might not recover. I saw that young lady stamp upon her with her feet; and the only remark her mother made was, 'I am afraid Evelina ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... vogue of the cafe in Paris, a chanson, entitled Coffee, reproduced here, was set to music with accompaniment for the piano by M.H. Colet, a professor of harmony at the Conservatoire. Printed in the form of a placard, and put up in cafes, it received the approbation of, and was signed by, de Voyer d'Argenson, at that time (1711) lieutenant of police. The poetry ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... sound a few yards from a piano, those piano-strings which are in harmony with my utterance will vibrate, and themselves send forth a kindred ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... just awful loud at granny. I want a dreffle big false face to scare in fits our ba- by. I want a pony I can race around the parlor, maybe. I want a little hatchet, too, so I can do some chopping upon our grand piano new, when mamma goes a-shopping. I want a nice hard rub- ber ball to smash all into flinders, the great big mirror in the hall an' lots an' lots of winders. An' candy that'll make me sick, so ma all night will hold me an' make pa get the ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... capital a large number of pupils, some of whom afterwards became eminent musicians. Among these were Beethoven, Hummel, Moscheles and Josef Weigl (1766-1846). Albrechtsberger died in Vienna on the 7th of March 1809. His published compositions consist of preludes, fugues and sonatas for the piano and organ, string quartets, &c.; but the greater proportion of his works, vocal and instrumental, exists only in manuscript. They are in the library of the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Probably ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... five, the front doorbell rang. Marie, the maid, went to open the door. Genevieve adjusted the down-sweeping, golden-brown tress over her right eye, brushed an invisible speck from the piano, straightened a rose in a vase, and after these traditionally bridal preparations, waited with a bride's optimistic smile the advent of a caller. But it was Marie who appeared at the door, with ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... bones, or something. I can't think what's the good of those delicate ones putting themselves into a school of this sort. A parson's is the place for them; eight gentlemanly pupils, treated as a private family, with a mild usher, and a lady to teach the piano." ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... affable, and most sedate, having motioned his visitor into his master's favourite chair, set down the tray of decanters and glasses upon the piano, coughed, and pulled down his waistcoat; and Mr. Brimberly did it all with that air of portentous dignity and leisurely solemnity which, together with his whiskers, made ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... clothed in red baize, while his wife was seated in front of him. Between the speeches the ladies burst forth into a sort of plaintive ditty. The party was entertained by a band of musicians, consisting of three drummers and four performers on the marimba, a species of piano. It consists of two bars of wood placed side by side; across these are fixed fifteen wooden keys, each two or three inches broad and about eighteen long, their thickness being regulated by the deepness of the note required. Each of the keys has a calabash below it, the upper portion of which, being ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... at home in the Hotel of the Three Friends by this time as if they had lived there all their lives. There was no stranger present at the meal, and it was not at all a surprising thing when Annette floated away to the piano at the further end of the room and began to tinkle at the keys there. She was by no means an accomplished musician, but she played a few little airs with a sort of spontaneity and grace, and she had a sweet, thin, bird-like voice, a clear and liquid note, which was perhaps her greatest ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... a piano broke the thread of the sweetest, maddest discourse Harrow had ever listened to; the girl's cheeks flushed and she turned expectantly toward the curtained stage. Again the lone note, thumped vigorously, sounded ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... anything but music; good boys, honest, but 'trotzig'. So much for Caffres, Fingoes, &c. The Bastaards are as clever as whites, and more docile—so the 'rector' told me. The boy who played the organ sang the 'Lorelei' like an angel, and played us a number of waltzes and other things on the piano, but he was too shy to talk; while the Caffres crowded round me, and chattered away merrily. The Mantatees, whom I cannot distinguish from Caffres, are scattered all over the colony, and rival the English as workmen and labourers—fine stalwart, industrious fellows. ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... Cricklander saw that a storm was gathering upon Mr. Hanbury-Green's brow and, admirable hostess that she was, she decided to smooth the troubled waters, so she went across the room to the piano, and began to play a seductive valse, while John Derringham followed her and leaned upon the lid, and tried to feel as ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... feel as if you could sit up and take a little nourishment. And you do. Then you smoke, seriously; you see friends; you potter; you play cards; you flirt with a book; you note that old age is creeping on; you take a stroll; you caress the piano.... By Jove! a quarter past eleven. You then devote quite forty minutes to thinking about going to bed; and it is conceivable that you are acquainted with a genuinely good whisky. At last you go to bed, exhausted by the day's work. Six hours, probably more, have gone ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... we bought an upright grand piano, and after we had had it a few months we noticed that one of the keys would stay down when touched, unless struck very quickly and lightly, and the next day another acted in the same way. That evening, after the boys had gone to bed, father and myself were ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... some valid and ostensible reason for examining the passage of the Worm, which would obviate any suspicion resulting from his being on the premises. He brought from London a Kelvin sounding apparatus, with a sufficient length of piano-wire for testing any probable depth. The wire passed easily over the running wheel, and when this was once fixed over the hole, he was satisfied to wait till the most advantageous time ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... of ten: "I should like to be a piano teacher, when I grow up, for then I shall be able to learn to play many pieces ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... the lead, and suddenly coming over a ridge above a steep ice-fall, I caught sight of the Mackellar Islets and the old "Piano" berg. Just at the same instant the spur of ice on which I was standing collapsed, and down I went into a crevasse. The others quickly had me out, and, as soon as I was in the upper air, I gave them the news: "There are the Islands!" Being twenty feet farther back on the rope ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... disturb them. There was rarely any service in the evening, but it was a pleasant time for the children, who in fine summer weather sat on the lawn and sang their favourite hymns, or on winter evenings gathered round the old piano in the well-worn parlour while their mother or Ruth played, or listened while their father talked or read some good and interesting book. All went to bed early, and rose in the morning refreshed and strengthened by the joy and repose of the day ...
— Ruth Arnold - or, the Country Cousin • Lucy Byerley
... think I gave you as good! "That foreign fellow,—who can know How she pays, in a playful mood, For his tuning her that piano?" ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... followed her in death. The big Kroeger house together with its honorable history was for sale, and the firm went out of business. Tonio's mother, however, his beautiful, passionate mother, who played the piano and the mandolin so wonderfully, and to whom everything was quite immaterial, married anew after the lapse of a year, this time a musician, a virtuoso with an Italian name whom she followed to far-away ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... foot-rest, and two footstools. A settee, with a small round table in front of it, fills the upper right-hand corner. In front, on the left, a little way from the wall, a sofa. Further back than the glass door, a piano. On either side of the doorway at the back a whatnot with terra-cotta and majolica ornaments.— Against the back wall of the inner room a sofa, with a table, and one or two chairs. Over the sofa hangs the portrait of a handsome elderly man in a General's uniform. Over the ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... mistakes might not be traced to that contrast. But I did not reason in those days; I was under the spell of the fair being who called me, "My son." I used to look at her with a kind of idolatry when she was seated at her piano in that elegant sanctum of hers, which she had hung with draped foreign stuffs, and decorated with tall green plants and various curious things, after a fashion entirely her own. For her sake, and in spite of my natural awkwardness ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... which is usually looked for only from those of advanced years, and after years of training. In many cases these children are born of parents and grandparents deficient in the particular branches of knowledge evidenced by the child. Babes scarcely able to sit on the piano stool, or to hold the violin, have begun to play in a way that certainly indicated previous knowledge and technique, often composing original productions in an amazing manner. Other young children have begun to ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... with the sheep, he found time to play the piano, to read and to write. In the library of St. John's College, Cambridge, are two copies of the Greek Testament, very fully annotated by him at the University and in the colony. He also read the Origin of Species, which, as everyone ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... of incidents going on; so now I seemed to be divided between two irreconcilable trains of thought; the gorgeous house, its elaborate furnishing, the little glimpses of yesterday's life, as seen in the open piano, with its sheet of music held in place by a lady's fan, occupying my attention fully as much as the aspect of the throng of incongruous and ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... can ride anything that goes on four legs. I can dance, and skate, and arrange flowers with taste. I can re-trim a hat, and at a pinch make a whole blouse. I can order a nice meal, and grumble when it is spoiled. I can strum on the piano and paint Christmas cards. I can ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... play and sing before he learnt to crawl: Piano, bones, or ophicleide—he played upon them all! Some talk of Paderewski, or of Dr Joachim— These artists meritorious are, but can't compare ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... tried to impart to her and her daughter some more exact information. When the conversation touched on Russian music, they begged him at once to sing some Russian air and showed him a diminutive piano with black keys instead of white and white instead of black. He obeyed without making much ado and accompanying himself with two fingers of the right hand and three of the left (the first, second, and little finger) he sang in a thin ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... flushed Priscilla. "That looks nice. You haven't got very far yet, have you? Never mind. Things go a lot faster after you've done 'em a while. Why, when I first tried to play the piano, my fingers went so slow, they just made me ache. Now ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... method, and the most satisfactory for small towns and farming regions. But in a great city such a plan grew to be suicidal. In New York, for instance, the price had to be raised to $240, which lifted the telephone as high above the mass of the citizens as though it were a piano or a diamond sunburst. Such a plan was strangling the business. It was shutting out the small users. It was clogging the wires with deadhead calls. It was giving some people too little service and others too much. It ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... voice soft, but only succeeded in making it very deep. A portion of her words was lost in the transit from her larynx to her lips, as though on a piano where some notes ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... that if foreign corn pays a duty, the price of every quarter grown here is raised, and this increased price goes into the farmer's or landlord's pocket: Why should I, or why should my men, pay twopence more for every loaf to buy Miss Wootton a piano?" ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... per hundred cigars made; intelligent, bright-eyed and witty; many of them comely, with rosy cheeks and ruddy health; educated at the common schools, and able, their day's work over, to sit down at the piano and ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... box supplied with flowers, such as apple-blossoms, cherry, spruce, maple, and so on. Also I kept her box disinfected, with plenty of good, fresh country dirt. But she stuck to the old wool and feathers, and the little piano-duster." ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... wandering through the old house, not intruding upon its aged mistress, save at stated times and seasons, but making a pleasant holiday of it; notwithstanding lessons with Miss Gordon again, and the strumming through of many scales and exercises on the piano. They never tired of roaming the terraces, where the peacocks eyed them askance, and spread out their beautiful tails at them as in proud disdain—those walking flowers of girls, who seemed to vie with them and their plumage in their pretty ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... of wood, or of anything else; a chump. The word is provincial in England, and colloquial in the United States. Cinder - Suende; sin. Clam - The popular name of a bivalvular shell-fish, the Venus. Clavier,(Ger.) - Piano. Colle belle,(Ital.) - With the beauties. Comedy - Committee. Conradin - The last of the imperial house of the Hohenstaufen - beheaded at Naples in 1268. Coot - (To cut) a dash, (to come out a "swell,") to dress extravagantly. Corned,(Amer.) - Made drunk. ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... exceedingly pretty. The hard-worked mother conceived high hopes for this favorite child. She was sent to a boarding-school, from which she returned entirely unsettled for life, having learned little except to be ashamed of her parents and to play on the piano. One of these instruments of torture was bought, and a room fitted up as a parlor for the daughter's use. As the family were fairly well-to-do, she was allowed to dress out of all keeping with her parents' position, and, egged on by her mother, tried her best to marry a rich ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... all right," Clara Belle replied soberly. "I'll have a good home and father can't keep us all; but it's kind of dreadful to be given away, like a piano or a horse ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... which he was wont to sing with a quiet and inimitable drollery, very refreshing to hear, and which those who heard them are not likely readily to forget. His love of music was part of his nature. His reposeful, wooing touch on the piano or organ, either when he was extemporising or when he interpreted one of the masters, expressed the inner working of his own gentle spirit. Whether in his own family, or among friends, or in the midst of his Foundry ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... the fictitious aids of language and of the emotional associations which are grouped about the peculiar timbre of the human voice. [64] At first the suggestion seems plausible; but on analogous grounds we might set the piano above the orchestra, because the piano gives us pure harmony and counterpoint, without the adventitious aid of variety in timbre. And it is indeed true that, for some such reason as this, musicians delight in piano-sonatas, which are above all things tedious and unintelligible to ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... execute any other."... Reding: "... Modern music did not come into existence till after the powers of the violin became known. Corelli himself, who wrote not two hundred years ago, hardly ventures on the shift. The piano, again, I have heard, has almost given birth to Beethoven." Campbell: "Modern music, then, could not be in ancient times for want of modern instruments, and, in like manner, Gothic architecture could not exist until vaulting was brought to perfection. Great ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... express themselves in terms of dollars for himself and others, is that of Mr. Joseph Hunter Dickinson, of New Jersey. Mr. Dickinson's specialty is in the line of musical instruments, particularly the piano. He began more than fifteen years ago to invent devices for automatically playing the piano, and is at present in the employ of a large piano factory, where his various inventions in piano-player mechanism are eagerly adopted in the construction of some of the finest player ...
— The Colored Inventor - A Record of Fifty Years • Henry E. Baker
... the parlors and stripped them of every ornament. Jennie's piano they dragged into the center of the floor, smashed its ivory keys and split its rosewood case into splinters. An officer slashed the portrait of Mrs. Barton into shreds and hurled the frame on the floor. Every portrait on the ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... a brass plate the legend "Boots neatly repaired," Mr. Tipping was engaged in giving one of those very music lessons. A dingy little maid-of-all-work opened the door, and said that Mrs. Tipping was out shopping, but would be back soon. From the front parlour came the lifeless tum-tumming of the piano, and Mr. Tipping's voice gruffly counting time to the cheerless five-finger exercises of ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... sound out of his bow, the tones leaped forth from the instruments, and, guided by his eye and hand, fell into a merry measure. The accuracy with which every instrument performed its part was truly marvelous. He could not have struck the measure or the harmony more certainly from the keys of his own piano than from that large band. The sounds struggled forth so perfect and distinct that one almost expected to see them embodied, whirling in wild dance around him. Sometimes the air was so exquisitely light and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... the time receiving her young-lady education at the Convent of St. Ursula, where, in the vine-covered, red-brick convent on the summit of Charlestown, she learned, under the guidance of the nuns, to sing, play the piano, the harp, and the guitar, to speak French, and read Spanish and Italian. But her life on Mt. Benedict was suddenly terminated when the convent was burned. So she entered earlier than would otherwise have been the ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... you will have really to go to the war, do you, John?" Amaryllis asked after she left the piano. "It will be all over, won't it, before the New Year, and in any case the Yeomanry are only for home defence, aren't they?" and she took a low seat and rested ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... bade me to their home,—a nest of a cottage, with gate and garden, hidden in London's endless rings of suburbs. I dimly recall through these years a room in cozy disorder, strewn with music—music on the floor and music on the chairs, music in the air as the master rushed to the piano now and again to make some memory ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... know where I was. The whole face of things in my room was completely changed. Flowers had been put in the china vases upon the tables—two handsome lamps, shaded with gauzes, stood upon the consoles —illustrated books, prints, and caricatures, were scattered about. A piano-forte had also, by some witchcraft, insinuated itself into a recess near the sofa—a handsome little tea service, of old Dresden china, graced a marquetry table—and a little picquet table stood most invitingly beside the fire. I had scarcely time to turn my eyes from one to the other ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... in your name, placing the room at her disposal. The paint is hardly dry yet, but will be ready this week, to receive the furniture if completed. I know no more about it than is contained in her note. I was also informed, last night, that a very handsome piano had been set up in the house, brought from Baltimore by the maker as a present from his firm or some friends. I have not seen it or the maker. This is an article of furniture that we might well dispense with under present circumstances, though I am equally obliged to those ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... and it will be such a pity to lose it all. I asked mamma the other evening, and she said she was sure she did not know; she might help me with my French, but she was afraid Cyril could not afford music-lessons. Besides, there would be the piano to hire; for of course I must practise. Oh dear! I don't see how I am to get on!' ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... through the sky. But regularly they dipped their wings in pitch black; Notting Hill, for instance, or the purlieus of Clerkenwell. No wonder that Italian remained a hidden art, and the piano always played the same sonata. In order to buy one pair of elastic stockings for Mrs. Page, widow, aged sixty-three, in receipt of five shillings out-door relief, and help from her only son employed in Messrs. Mackie's dye-works, suffering in winter with his chest, letters must be written, columns ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... more than settled down comfortably when the Chief found it necessary to make another trip down. When he mentioned going I played the piano so loud I couldn't hear him. I had no desire to go. Not while I could sit in my warm house and read and sew in my comfortable rocking chair. It was without a single qualm that I waved him a floury adieu from the midst of cookie-making. ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... apples in their cheeks as well as in their cellars at home, and their trim tidy wives. Eight or ten Irish children came also,—Bridget, Rosanna, Patrick, and Michael, and Mr. And Mrs. O'Brien themselves. Aunt Kindly had her piano there, and ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker
... side-spectacle that struck me most when I walked by myself through Combles was that of a solitary Royal Engineer playing a grand piano in the open street, with not a soul to listen to him. The house from which the instrument had been dragged was smashed beyond repair; save for some scrapes on the varnish the piano had suffered no harm, and its tone was agreeable to the ear. The pianist possessed ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... sister Sue stood looking at the queer, big automobile. They had seen some like it once before passing through the town, loaded with tables, chairs, a piano and other things, when someone was moving. But this automobile ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue on Grandpa's Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... never is the gent who gets ahead of that old silver tip—takin' the word from Peets in advance, sends over to Tucson for a coffin as fine as the dance-hall piano, an' it comes along in the stage ahead of Billy's mother. When she does get thar, Billy's all laid out handsome an' tranquil in the dinin'-room of the O. K. Restauraw, an' the rest of us is eatin' supper in the street. It looks selfish to go crowdin' a he'pless ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... father to go to Christ Church and stay with the Dodans. Mr. Dodan had frequently invited him, and Miss Dodan's brightness and her cheerful art at the piano would, I know, cheer him, inured too long to his lonely life, subject to the periodic returns of that bitter sadness, which was now only accentuated by his self-imposed exile from the home and scenes of ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... Minnie Wall to the head of the set, other children rushed for places, Mrs. Legrange seated herself at the piano, and the merry dance went on; but, when it was over, Minnie Wall returned to Mrs. Legrange's side, followed by two or three more, begging her to play the cachuca, and see how nicely 'Toinette could dance it. Half unwillingly the mother complied, and ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... the daily life of a sailor on a little pleasure boat lacks interest, and if circumstances had been, different Ruggiero would probably have shipped before now as boatswain on board one of the neat schooners which are yearly built at the Piano di Sorrento, to be sold with their cargoes of salt as soon as they reach Buenos Ayres. But Ruggiero had contracted that malady of the heart which had taken him to the chemist's for the first time in his life, and which materially hindered the formation of any ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... he declared that he had been exceedingly funny. He had in the course of the evening recited "near upon five hundred extempore macaronic verses; composed and executed an oratorio and opera" upon a piano without strings, namely the center-table; drawn "an entirely original view of Nantasket Beach"; made a temperance address; and given vent to "innumerable jests, jokes, puns, oddities, quiddities and nothings," interrupted by his own laughter and that of his ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... to the rescue by introducing a new topic of conversation, that of a European tenor that was soon expected to startle New York. Daisy went to the piano, and played softly, talking in whispers to Roseleaf, who leaned feverishly over her shoulder. But she made no allusion to Hannibal, and he did his ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... or in the room of one of the girls if preferred. If possible, a piano is included in the furnishings, which may be as elaborate or as simple as desired. Two entrances must be provided, one covered by a square framework supposed to represent a bookcase. Books are across the top. In front of it hangs ...
— The Belles of Canterbury - A Chaucer Tale Out of School • Anna Bird Stewart
... again in the window seat. Her other guests faded here and there. For a time there were shadowy fancies from the piano, then the house was stilled. But outside an April rain was falling. It pelted the windowpanes as softly as driven petals. It made a fairy swish as of far-off waves, and we sat together in a dim light. Isabel's eyes ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... to marry her. But I shall betroth you to the daughter of Eli Witebski, the great merchant. You are longing for learning—flu! I am going to give you a very well educated wife. Her parents keep her in a boarding school at Wilno; she speaks French and plays the piano. Nu! if you are so difficult to please, that girl ought to suit you. She is sixteen years old. Her father will give her a big dowry, and immediately after the wedding ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... whispered to Miss Cleopatra Hungerschnitz, whereupon that young lady giggled her way over to the piano and began to ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... and they ascended half-a-dozen steps into the house. Then, off a wide passage, a door was opened, and they found themselves in a great saloon with polished oak floor. There was hardly any furniture—three or four chairs, some benches against the walls and a grand piano. The mantelpiece was covered with photographs, and there were life-sized photographs in frames on the walls. Owen pointed to one of a somewhat stout woman in evening-dress, and he whispered ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... easy to see from the white, set look of her face as the monotonous months dragged on that she was no nearer to accomplishing that task than on the day of her arrival. Nothing that Knight could do made any difference. When an upright cottage piano appeared one day, the girl seemed ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real centre of the household; and that if any visitor wants to play the piano the whole room has to be upset before it can be opened, there are so many things piled on it. I never lived until I learned to ride; and I shall never ride really well because I didn't begin as a child. There are only two classes ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... sometimes had a flash of consciousness of a transfiguration in the very flesh of my face, just as I have a sense of rapturous strength sometimes in the very flesh and bone of my right hand, when I strike on the piano some of Beethoven's chords. But I know that, except in the light of your presence, I have no beauty. I had not so much to lose by illness as other women. But, dear one, that little is gone. I can read in the pitying looks ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... caused people to stumble. A narrow hall separated the kitchen from the parlour, where Madame Aubain sat all day in a straw armchair near the window. Eight mahogany chairs stood in a row against the white wainscoting. An old piano, standing beneath a barometer, was covered with a pyramid of old books and boxes. On either side of the yellow marble mantelpiece, in Louis XV style, stood a tapestry armchair. The clock represented a temple of Vesta; and the ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... Where was there an apostle apter to receive this doctrine, so convenient for me as it was—beautiful Nature, and all that humbug? It is nothing but that. Well, the world was watching; and it saw "The Piano," the "White Girl," the Thames subjects, the marines ... canvases produced by a fellow who was puffed up with the conceit of being able to prove to his comrades his magnificent gifts, qualities which only needed a rigorous training to make their ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... was curious enough to ask her why she smiled. Lady Agatha at the piano was playing Wagner like a professional musician. Mrs. Morres's smile grew ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... of the older masters; such are Mozart's "additional'' accompaniments to Handel's Messiah or those to many of the elder Bach's works by Robert Franz. In common parlance any support given, e.g. by the piano, to a voice or instrument is loosely called an accompaniment, which may be merely "vamped'' by the introduction of a few chords, or may rise to the dignity of an artistic composition. In the history ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... at the funeral. They lifted the machinery out of him and buried him quietly in the cemetery. Whenever the Chubbs buy musical boxes now, they get them as large as a piano, and chain them to the wall. ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... her throat and lays a voluptuous cud of chewing gum upon the piano as the first notes of the accompaniment ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... of flight possessed him and made the fear of what lay behind overpoweringly great. The lumps of ice gave way beneath him, and he had to leap from piece to piece; his feet moved as fast as fingers over the notes of a piano. He just noticed enough to take the direction toward the harbor breakwater. The others stood gaping on the beach while Pelle danced upon the water like a stone making ducks and drakes. The pieces of ice bobbed under as ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... more misleading. In spite of Sir Hubert Parry and other writers, I cannot think that the Moors in Spain, for instance, covered poverty of thought beneath superficial ingenuity of design. The Alhambra outdoes in "passage work," in virtuoso arabesques, all that an army of Liszts could do in piano literature; and yet the Arabs were the saviours of science, and promoted the greatest learning and depth of thought known in Europe in their time. As for Liszt, there is such an astounding wealth of poetry and deep feeling beneath the somewhat "flashy," bombastic trick ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... mantelpiece, where rested an array of smoking-materials and a large silver cigarette-box, hung an ancestral-looking portrait, in a dull gilded frame, of an aged man, with a ruff round his neck, purchased for one guinea; there was a sofa and a set of chairs upholstered in a good damask: a black piano by Broadwood; a large oval gate-leg table; a bureau; shelves filled with very indiscriminate literature—law books, novels, Badminton, magazines and ancient school editions of the classics; a mahogany ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... Mr. Bowie, brother-in-law of the Hon. Reverdy Johnson, of Baltimore. The house was very handsome, with a fine, extensive grass-plot in front. We entered the yard, and, leaving our horses with the headquarters escort, walked to the house. On the front-porch I found a magnificent grand-piano, with several satin-covered arm-chairs, in one of which sat a Union soldier (one of McPherson's men), with his feet on the keys of the piano, and his musket and knapsack lying on the porch. I asked him what he was doing there, and he answered that he was "taking a rest;" this was manifest and I started ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... Look at the perfect polish of that table! It's like the finish of a rosewood piano." He touched ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... of form and invariable smallness of the hands of Gypsies, who have inherited their hands from high-cast Hindoos, and the so-called racial hands of real aristocrats. That hard work, even tumbling, piano playing, etc., should alter the form of a hand is self-evident, since muscles grow stronger with practice and the skin becomes coarser and drawn through friction, sharp wind and insufficient care. As is well known, physical properties ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... red brick row on the outskirts of the red brick town of Belfast, Mrs. Dennis McCullough, daughter of the south of Ireland, gave testimony that the goodheartedness of her neighbors prevails over their prejudice even in time of crisis. Her husband, a piano merchant, has been in some seven prisons for his political activities. He had told of plank beds, of food he could not eat, of the quelling of prison outbreaks by hosing the prisoners and then letting them lie in their wet clothes on cold floors. He had spoken of evading prison ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... it why don't you send him a piano, and an automobile, too, so he can ride home when he wants to? What do you mean—getting word to him? Don't you know that the beastly Huns will hold up the mail as they please, and anything else we might send. They don't even let the Red Cross packages go through until ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... the seeming dilettantism of their little piano pieces, and songs, and French chamber-music, which German art never deigned to notice, while Christophe himself had hitherto failed to see the poetic accomplishment of it all, he now began to see the fever of renovation, ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... advantageously married to a young gentleman who dealt in coals and played the violin (for N——- was a very musical town), had just joined her for the purpose of extorting "The Swiss Boy, with variations," out of a sleepy little piano, that emitted a very painful cry under the awakening fingers ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Aurora to Aeolus, as they sat o'er their bohea, Surrounded by Zephyruses—exactly three times three— "Olus, dear, a new piano is the thing of things we want." I regret to say Aeolus raised his eyes and said "We dont!" So unlike his mournful manner, when his sweet sad harp he plays; And he heav'd a sigh regretful as he thought of other days— As he thought of early moments, ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... from the divan, and would have hurried to the piano, but Marianne held him back. "Maestro," said she, "before we sacrifice to Apollo, let us give to life and mortality their rights. Prose awaits us in the dining-room, and we shall give her audience before we open the pages of ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... and her heart began to go out to her in honest helpfulness from the first. She broke in upon the monotony of Marcia's days with the offices and interests of wholesome commonplace, and exorcised the ghostly silence with her first stroke on the piano,—which Bartley had bought on the instalment plan and had not yet ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... (Cox being unable to accompany him on the piano or any other instrument, by reason of the severe weather) to hear STAVENHAGEN at St. James's Hall, Thursday last, the 22nd. Our Musical B. was nearly turned out of the hall, he was in such ecstasies of delight over a Beethovenly concerto, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 31, 1891 • Various
... the elaborately carved porch. She looked round the brown hall where deep shadows lurked. Oak chests and carved chairs, all more or less dusty, stood about, looking as if disorderly feasters had just left them. In one corner was an inlaid sideboard piano. ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... we went to an entertainment at the house of Pepita. The cross which had stood at the door was now placed in a large saloon on the ground-floor, in which there is a piano, and Pepita presented us with a simple and poetic spectacle, one that I had seen when a child, ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... moreover, in full view of the bow window of Kildare Street Club, that the cup of the under-strapper's misfortunes brimmed over. To be sure he could not know that the new owner of the grey mare was in that window; it was enough for him that a quiescent and unsuspected piano-organ broke with three majestic chords into Mascagni's "Intermezzo" at his very ear, and that, without any apparent interval of time, he was surmounting a heap composed of a newspaper boy, a sandwich man, and a hospital nurse, while his hands held nothing save a red-hot memory of where ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... furniture. Messrs. Broadwood's Grand Pianoforte (illustrated) was a rich example of decorative woodwork in ebony and gold, and may be compared with the illustration on p. 172 of a harpsichord, which the Piano had replaced about 1767, and which at and since the time of the 1851 Exhibition supplies evidence of the increased attention devoted to decorative furniture. In the Appendix will be found a short notice of the different phases through which ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... possess special qualities of physical and emotional suggestiveness. Dangerous as it is to characterize the qualities of the sound of a word apart from the sense of that word, there is undeniably such a thing as "tone-color." A piano and a violin, striking the same note, are easily differentiated by the quality of the sound, and of two violins, playing the same series of notes, it is usually possible to declare which instrument has the richer tone or timbre. Words, likewise, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... in the pond at the bottom of his garden, he had rabbits in the pantry, white mice in his piano, a squirrel in the linen closet and a hedgehog ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... her pretty lip, but made no answer. She took up the music, and seating herself at the piano, practised the airs. Lady Vargrave listened with emotion; and as Evelyn in a voice exquisitely sweet, though not powerful, sang the words, her mother turned away her face, and half unconsciously, a few tears stole ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book I • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... his mother that his Uncle Union's house in Haverhill had tall columns, green blinds on the white woodwork, and a wide hall running down the centre. For it made him feel more at home at the Culpeppers'. But when the Hendricks' piano came, after they moved into the big house, the boy's heart was opened afresh; and he spent hours with Bob Hendricks at the piano, when he knew he would be welcome at the Culpeppers'. He leased his town ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... the rear were two tiny rooms for the hired help. At the other bungalow Ben and his friends occupied three little rooms, while Mr. and Mrs. Basswood had a large apartment off to one side. At this bungalow there was an extra large living-room in which was placed, among other things, a small upright piano, somewhat out of tune but ...
— Dave Porter At Bear Camp - The Wild Man of Mirror Lake • Edward Stratemeyer
... of the other sex: a party never seemed complete from which he was absent: there was no one whose hand she more willingly accepted for the dance, or whose praise was more welcome when she rose from the piano: but though the emotions she felt in his presence were so agreeable, she had not suspected them to be those of love. Her brother had abruptly awakened her to the reality. In the simplicity of her innocence, ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... house. (This may mean fifty pieces with two leaders or it may mean a piano, violin and drum, or ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... years old. I have no pets except a Maltese cat and a dog. I was very much interested in the dog and cat of Madelaine, the little French girl. I like "The Moral Pirates" and "Who was Paul Grayson?" best of all the stories. My father gave me a piano for my birthday present; and when I was seven years old he gave me a pony, and I named him Button. I dearly love to gallop over ...
— Harper's Young People, October 19, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... hat with an angry vehemence, and, seating herself at the piano, literally stormed the keys, while the Doctor re-entered his carriage and quietly proceeded to his evening ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... little reception, forming the acquaintance, among others, of Miss Lou Hornsby, a fresh-looking young woman, who had an exclamation of surprise or a grimace of wonder for every statement she heard and for every remark that was made. Miss Hornsby also went to the piano, and played and sang "Nelly Gray" and "Lily Dale" with a dramatic fervor that could only have been acquired in a boarding school. The Rev. Arthur Hill was also there, a little gentleman, whose side-whiskers and modest deportment betokened both refinement and sensibility. ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... which made it necessary for her to spend some portion of every month in the city. This threw the entire charge of house and store on me. As soon, therefore, as possible, she sent me to the city to school, where I realized my aspiration of studying ancient history and the piano, and devoured the contents of the text-book of natural philosophy with an avidity I had ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... a harpsichord, a spinet, and a piano, all tuned expressly for her. This amused her, as she had never seen either of the two older instruments in her life. She played on ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... shriek on shriek, again begin; Let us now visit him; after this strain He ever communes with himself again, And sees nor hears not any.' Having said 270 These words, we called the keeper, and he led To an apartment opening on the sea— There the poor wretch was sitting mournfully Near a piano, his pale fingers twined One with the other, and the ooze and wind 275 Rushed through an open casement, and did sway His hair, and starred it with the brackish spray; His head was leaning on a music book, And he was muttering, and his lean limbs shook; His lips were ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... criminous tomes weakly fascinated until I shivered and shook in my stocking soles. Often I longed to do something hysterically desperate, to rouse Raffles and bring the street about our ears; once I did bring him about mine by striking a single note on the piano, with the soft pedal down. His neglect of me seemed wanton at the time. I have long realized that he was only wise to maintain silence at the expense of perilous amenities, and as fully justified in ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... expect to be ushered into spacious and luxuriously-furnished parlors, where, seated in comfortably-padded rocking-chairs, and contemplating marble tables, on which gorgeously- bound volumes are artistically arranged; thousand-dollar piano-fortes, and mirrors capable of abashing a modest man to utter speechlessness, he will tarry the advent of stately dames, whose dresses rustle as with conscious opulence. He will precede them—they being scrupulous as to ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... with this home spirit. It lacked that toleration and regard without which the home is nothing. There was fine furniture, arranged as soothingly as the artistic perception of the occupants warranted. There were soft rugs, rich, upholstered chairs and divans, a grand piano, a marble carving of some unknown Venus by some unknown artist, and a number of small bronzes gathered from heaven knows where, but generally sold by the large furniture houses along with everything else which goes to make the "perfectly ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... say that she "seemed to him the connecting link between woman and angel." [Footnote: Jackson of Exeter, too, giving a description of her, in some Memoirs of his own Life that were never published, said that to see her, as she stood singing beside him at the piano-forte, was "like looking into the face of an angel."] The devotedness of affection, too, with which she was regarded, not only by her own father and sisters, but by all her husband's family, showed that her fascination ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... Anglais, a bas les Juifs. 'Conspuez Coco.' In less than five minutes the organ was disintegrated, and the luckless minstrel flying with torn trousers down a side street. For the next few days la haute gomme promenaded with fragments of the piano organ suspended from watch chains as trophies of victory. But this was not all. Paris broke out into poetry over l'affaire Narcisse, and here is a journal sent to me by my friend which contains a poem in forty-nine stanzas ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... Conneelys had done well in the Intermediate. Their elder brother was a priest. Father Tom's photograph was in the centre of the chimney-piece a-top of the clock. They could play the piano and violin and had fortunes when the time came for them to marry. Their mother would never have permitted them to serve in the bar nor even behind the drapery counter. They were black-haired, rosy, buxom girls, who set the fashions in Killesky. There had been ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... rettycule; and fetched and carried her handkercher, or her smell-bottle, like a well-bred spaniel. All night, at her ladyship's swarries, she thumped kidrills (nobody ever thought of asking HER to dance!); when Miss Griffing sung, she played the piano, and was scolded because the singer was out of tune; abommanating dogs, she never drove out without her ladyship's puddle in her lap; and, reglarly unwell in a carriage, she never got anything but the back seat. Poar Jemima! I can ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... aide-de-camp. Madame Duroc forgot herself, I have heard, so far as to beat her servants, and to bear herself in a most singular manner toward people who were in no wise her dependants. When M. Dubois came to tune her piano, unfortunately she was at home, and finding the noise required by this operation unendurable, drove the tuner off with the greatest violence. In one of these singular attacks she one day broke all the keys of his instrument. Another ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... at table, Herr Gluck, a piano manufacturer of Munich, was a follower of Horace Fletcher, the American munching missionary. Unlike the Swiss, who craved raw food, Herr Gluck ate everything, but each mouthful only after thorough maceration, salivation, and slow deglutition. At breakfast he absorbed a glass of milk and a piece ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... maid in the unromantic daylight, the restlessness she had engendered remained, replacing the settled bitterness which was all he had brought back from America. In the afternoon this restlessness drove him to the piano in the deserted dining-hall, and his fever sought to work itself off in a fury of practice. But the inner turbulence persisted, and the new thoughts clung round the old music. He was playing Schumann's Fantasiestuecke, ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... what they have seen or dreamed or felt during three hundred years. The work is dedicated to Goethe, who wrote an almost enthusiastic review of it for the Literary Gazette of Jena. "Every lover or master of musical art," he says, "should have this volume upon his piano." ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... comforted. At a dance which we had one evening Poppi insisted upon being present, and in his efforts to keep out of the way and in the apprehensions he suffered he abandoned himself to moans and howls that sometimes drowned the piano. ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells
... clumpety-clump!" of a stamp-mill on a shoulder of a hill high above the camp, drowned the whir and chirp of night insects, and from the second story of a house they passed they heard the crude banging of a piano, and a woman's strident voice wailing, "She may have seen better da-a-ys," with a mighty effort to ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... have their origin in the will of the dancer alone, or in some outside force? The daisies in the meadow and the waves of the sea dance because they are agitated by the wind. The little cork automaton upon the sounding board of a piano dances because it is agitated by the vibrations of the strings. The little children in the alleys of a great city seem to be agitated in the same way ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... afternoon, and even then was too much fatigued to sit up long. I prepared for his use a large room on the south side of the house, with a smaller apartment within it; to this we carried his favorite books and pictures, his easy-chair and lounge. My piano stood in a recess; a guitar hung near it. When all was finished, it looked homelike, pleasant; and we removed William to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Englishman. He was reasonably willing to do the duty that confronted him, and loved but three forms of recreation,—to be with his two most intimate friends, Rita and Dic, to wander in the trackless forests, and to play upon his piano. His piano was his sweetheart, and often in the warm summer evenings, when his neighbors were in bed, would the strains of his music lull them to sleep, and float out into the surrounding forests, awakening the ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... serenader, and the others of his race, And the piano organist - I've got him on the list! And the people who eat peppermint and puff it in your face, They never would be missed - they never would be missed! Then the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, All centuries but this, and ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... unexpected nature. It set forth with conveying and disponing all and whole the estate and lands of Singleside and others, with the lands of Loverless, Liealone, Spinster's Knowe, and heaven knows what beside, 'to and in favours of (here the reader softened his voice to a gentle and modest piano) Peter Protocol, clerk to the signet, having the fullest confidence in his capacity and integrity—these are the very words which my worthy deceased friend insisted upon my inserting—but in TRUST always (here the reader recovered his voice and style, and the visages of several of the ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... most kind and friendly, and were full of good offices. Once I happened to say that I did not like the food as it was cooked at the boarding-house; and the next day, and for many days after, all sorts of dainties were sent to me, prepared by hands which were as skilful on the piano, or with a pencil, as they were in handling a saucepan. New books were lent to me, and I was never allowed to be without a beautiful bouquet. One young lady used constantly to walk in to town, some ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... by the wiser mother, triumphed. In those days musical nuns played upon a dumb spinet, that they might not disturb the quiet of their convents. It was a sort of piano, and the strings were muffled with cloth. One of these spinets was smuggled into the garret of Dr. Handel's house. At night, George would steal up to the attic and practise upon it. But not a tinkle could ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... falsetto, and a grinding, singsong falsetto at that—the most disagreeable sound I ever heard in music—is very common, and highly esteemed. The instruments resemble banjos, and there is a harsh kind of drum accompaniment; but there is one larger string instrument, the Japanese piano, upon which much older women play, the younger girls not being sufficiently skilled to perform ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... process of making life more complex and subtle. We have the piano, the violin, the orchestra. Yet we also have rag-time, which is a reaction from the nervous tension of American commercial life, a swinging back to the old days when man, though a brute, was free. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... of the philosophic, historian with which she always recorded the current incidents of her daughter's career. "She got dressed on purpose before dinner. But she's got a friend of hers there; that gentleman—the Italian—that she wanted to bring. They've got going at the piano; it seems as if they couldn't leave off. Mr. Giovanelli sings splendidly. But I guess they'll come before very long," concluded ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... cheerless apartment, hot in the unshaded light of a tropical noonday. The tables were not alluring. The waiters were American negroes. A Filipino youth, dressed in a white suit, and wearing his black hair in a pompadour, was beating out "rag time" at a cracked old piano. ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... a vault a few notes of prelude were struck upon the piano in the parlor below, and a sweet voice, softened ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... of a remonstrance and an explanation. The remonstrance pointed out that his work was desultory and liable to be interrupted at any moment, for any caprice: that steady grind was incompatible with the giving away of whole mornings to musical dreams at the piano, or to rambles in the woods, a book of poetry in hand. The explanation was to the effect that the great prizes of the world are all within the reach of every clever lad who starts with a sufficiency of ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... no violinist has ever been able to play. Victor Herbert has recently analyzed some of these compositions and shown that Paganini himself could never have played them without using four hands and handling two bows at once. So far, no one can play a duet on the piano; the hand can span only so many keys, and the attempt of Robert Schumann to improve on Nature by building an artificial extension to his fingers was vetoed by paralysis of the members. Two bodies can not occupy the same space at the same time; mathematics has its limit, for you ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... wrecked that he was obliged to leave it; and in the house of another friend a heavy German stove on the upper floor, having been thrown over, had come down through the ceiling of the main parlor, crashing through the grand piano, and thence into the cellar, without injury to any person. One of the professors whom I afterward met told me that he was giving a dinner-party when, suddenly, the house was lifted and shaken to and fro, the chandeliers swinging, broken glass ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... on all of them some time," went on Songbird. "That Minnie Sanderson told me she plays the piano, and sings. I am going to get her to sing a new song I am writing. It ...
— The Rover Boys at College • Edward Stratemeyer
... courtin' her mother. I don't believe I'd ever got her without that banjo," he added and laughed with great good humour. "Nancy don't think much of it," he went on. "She thinks it's nothin' beside the piano, but Raymond, here, is like me, he thinks it beats ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... "Mr. Arnold," she added, looking at me eagerly, "I can paint and sing and play the piano. Can't people earn money sometimes by doing these things? I would work—oh, I am not afraid to work. Couldn't I stay here ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... I said. "The beautifully contrived, apparatus made of ever so many wooden keys like the inside of a piano—only those are set in circles. It fits close to the head and you can make it looser or tighter, and when you've got it on you look like a Siamese king in his crown. And when you take it off you tear out a piece of paper and that gives you the exact ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... any cast-offs she thought would fit Miss Smith. "They must wear about the same size, the girl is so slight," Howard said as he went to Amy's room, where he found her still standing by the window drumming upon the pane as if fingering a piano and humming softly to herself. She never touched the grand instrument in the drawing-room, and when asked to do so and sing, she answered, "I can't; I can't. It would bring it all back and shake up the bottle. I hate the ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... born were those in which you have played, in my hearing, the Drinking-song from La Traviata. Believe me, then, my devoted pupil, there can be nothing at all inconsistent with a prevalence of profound melancholy in your continued piano-playing; whereas, on the contrary, your sudden and permanent cessation might at least surprise your friends and the neighborhood into a light-heartedness temporarily oblivious of the memory of that dear, missing boy, to whom you could not, I hear, give the love ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various
... is by their contraction that we are enabled to pursue different employments. By their action the farmer cultivates his fields, the mechanic wields his tools, the sportsman pursues his game, the orator gives utterance to his thoughts, the lady sweeps the keys of the piano, and the young are whirled in the mazy dance. As the muscles bear so intimate a relation to the pleasures and employments of man, a knowledge of the laws by which their action is governed, and the conditions upon ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... Hector opened the piano, and Mrs. Rivington sat down and touched the keyboard. Then she looked around for silence, and it fell completely. All the eye-witnesses present are agreed that it was in the moment of this pause that the drawing-room door opened, and they heard ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... Hungarian wine of excellent flavour. The attentions of the bailiff and his lady were likewise unremitting; indeed, the latter was almost too kind, for she seemed anxious that we should eat of every dish, and drink out of every flask and bottle. We had a little music too,—for she played the piano; and the commissary, likewise a performer, paid us the compliment to dash off in very good style, "God save the King." But the circumstance which amused me most of all remains to be stated. I was asked if I played chess; and I replied in the affirmative, adding, however, as the facts of the ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... mounted the platform, followed by the orator from London (a florid gentleman in a frock-coat and dingy white waistcoat), the Vicar, Mr Hambly, Mr Pamphlett, Dr Mant, and Mr Rounsell. As they entered, Miss Rounsell, seated at the piano at the far end of the platform, struck the opening chords of "God Save the King." It seemed to take the audience by surprise: but they shuffled to their feet and, after a few bars, ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... small and rather stiff. As one's eyes became accustomed to the dim green light one noticed the incongruity of the furniture: the horsehair chairs and sofa, and large accountant's desk with ledgers; the large Pleyel grand piano; a bookcase, in which all the books were rare copies or priceless MSS. of old-fashioned operas; hanging against the wall an inlaid guitar and some faded laurel crowns; moreover, a fine engraving of a composer, twenty years ago the most popular man in Italy; lastly, an oil-colour portrait, by Winterman, ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... insomnia it would be invaluable, and we therefore sleep a good deal, but most of the day is passed in the restaurant. Here the military element is generally engrossed in an interminable game of Vint[1] (during the process of which a Jew civilian is mercilessly rooked), but our piano is a godsend and most Russian women are born musicians. So after dejeuner we join the fair sex, who beguile the hours with Glinka and Tchaikovsky until they can play and sing no more. By the way, no one ever knows the time of day and no one particularly wants to. Petersburg time is kept throughout ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... ten years old when she joined her parents in Paris, where she was placed under the care of masters. She played with skill on the harp and piano, and being passionately fond of music, it became her solace and amusement at an advanced age. In her youth dancing was equally a passion with her. The grace with which she executed the shawl-dance suggested to Madame de Stael the dance-scene in "Corinne." It is said that great care was bestowed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Another assistant director, or perhaps he was only a property boy, rushed up frantically the moment he saw Drexel. "Miss Miller's on a rampage because the grand piano you promised to get for her isn't at her apartment yet, and Bessie Terry's in tears because she left her parrot here overnight, as you suggested, and some one taught the bird to swear." The intruder, a youth of ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... expects you to listen to him. This man is apparently unaware whether you are listening to him or not. He is not a fool. A fool is occasionally amusing— Longrush never. No subject comes amiss to him. Whatever the topic, he has something uninteresting to say about it. He talks as a piano-organ grinds out music steadily, strenuously, tirelessly. The moment you stand or sit him down he begins, to continue ceaselessly till wheeled away in cab or omnibus to his next halting-place. As in the case of his prototype, his rollers are changed about once a month to suit the popular taste. ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... far as A B ab, while she was at Miss Deeble's; but if she were backward with her book, her other faculties began to be acute. It was down in that empty kitchen that she first felt the enchantment of music. Some one suddenly played the piano overhead and Beth listened spell-bound. Again and again the player played, and always the same thing, practising it. Beth knew every note. Long afterwards she was trying some waltzes of Chopin's, and came upon one with which she was quite familiar. She knew that she had heard it all, over and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... he lay down on one of the green velvet couches, relics of past Pullman glories, and there, with the rumble and roar of steel trains overhead, with the smart click of the billiard balls sounding in his ears, with the phonograph and the electric piano going full blast, with the boys dancing and larking all about the big room, he fell sound asleep as only a boy cub ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... again exclaimed Miss Pamela, "here is some money I didn't expect. Didn't I tell you, Kitty Plumstone, that Providence would send you some new music somehow? She plays on the piano, Master Ned; I really do think she is going to make quite a musician. I teach her myself, you know. I can't play any more because of the stiffness in my fingers, but Kitty can play 'Days of Absence,' and 'Come, Haste to ...
— Harper's Young People, June 29, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... "The piano cover. That Persian silk, you know, that my brother sent me. I never knew how handsome it was before. The ruff, and those wonderful puffed sleeves, are mosquito-netting; the whole effect ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... that there was a new piano in the drawing-room, in addition to a number of those easier chairs which our grandmothers never knew. Cousin Peligros protested that they were unnecessary and even conducive to sloth and indolence. Still protesting, she took the ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... were there, too. Peter hardly ever plays on the big, old-fashioned grand-piano, but that night he was so bored he had to. The family always THINK they're very musical—you can know the style when I tell you that after Peter has been rambling through bits from Schumann and Richard Strauss they always ask him if ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... of treachery; and she slipped forthwith into a tiny conservatory behind the piano. It was her only refuge. She could but hope that no one had seen her retire thither. Her need for solitude just then was intense. She felt herself physically incapable of facing the crowd in the music-room any longer. The first crashing chords of the piano ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... guarded attitude toward me relented. "John mentioned your cultivation to us," she said. "In these tumble-down days it is rare to meet with one who still lives, mentally, on the gentlefolks' plane—the piano nobile of intelligence!" ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... beginning to live, and open our eyes, silly? Listen: Books, books, books, from top to bottom of the house, that is what I want first of all—except my piano." ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... unable to go to church at Winterdyne one snowy morning in 1873. She asked for her Prayer-book while still in bed, as she always liked to follow the services for the day. On Mr. Shaw, her brother-in-law, returning from church, he heard the piano sounding. "Why, Frances," he said, "I thought you were upstairs." "Yes, but I had my Prayer-book, and in the Psalm for to-day I read, 'Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King.' I thought what a splendid first line; and then the words and music came rushing on to ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... you?—This room is rather an improvement over the one we had last winter. There is more of a view"—she goes to the window—"of the houses across the Place; and I always think the swell front gives a pretty shape to a room. I'm sorry they've stopped building them. Your piano goes very nicely into that little alcove. Yes, we're quite palatial. And, on the whole, I'm glad there's no fireplace. It's a pleasure at times; but for the most part it's a vanity and a vexation, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and external workshops have since been added. The institution is entirely supported by voluntary contributions, though a few paying pupils are admitted. The pupils are taught any industrial trade which may support them in after-life, such as piano-tuning, knitting, chair-caning, basket-making, as well as the usual branches of a useful education. They are admitted at any age under eight, and leave at twenty-one if men, and twenty-four if women. There are day-scholars ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... sister, Nannerl, as he used to call her, had been taken by their father, in 1762, to Vienna, where the children played the piano before the Empress Maria Theresa and her husband. Little Wolfgang was here, as everywhere, perfectly at his ease, with a simplicity and childish grace that won every heart. When he had been playing for some time, he jumped without ceremony on the lap of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... a most gloomy conceptions of overwhelming fetters, black bread, and green water. He arrived at the principal gaol in Hubbabub. He was ushered into an elegantly furnished apartment, with French sash windows and a piano. Its lofty walls were entirely hung with a fanciful paper, which represented a Tuscan vineyard; the ceiling was covered with sky and clouds; roses were in abundance; and the windows, though well secured, excited no jarring associations in the mind of the ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... not consulted economy. So she depended on basket-chairs, screens, brackets and drapery to enliven the ancient mahagony and rosewood, and she had accumulated a good many water colours, vases and knick-knacks. The old grand piano was found to be past its work, so that she went the length of purchasing a cottage one for the drawing-room, and another for the sitting-room that was to be the girls' own property, and on which ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... could not resist entering the room, and this, in spite of the apologetic air of Marie. The room looked as neat as I had imagined it, seeing it from the mirror of Marie's mind. I should say it scarcely needed that broom which still remained expectantly in Marie's hand. A piano, spider-legged, in the number and thinness of these supports, stood at one side of the room, weighed down with classic-looking music. A bouquet, that had been given by the hand of the prima donna to ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... first adventure with a player-piano. I was conscious of two distinct emotions—the first a wearing tension lest some one should come to interrupt, and the second that I did not deserve this, that I had not earned it.... The instrument had that excellence of the finely evolved things. It ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... too, voted chestnut gathering a rare good time. Far off, and now near, the girls were singing their quaint wild songs. Thus heard, the rondinella sounds well: it is of the woods and deserts; strange, barbaric, oriental, bacchantic, what you please, save dawdling drawing-room and piano-ic. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... went by in this way. Gaston grew bold enough to write a long letter to the Marquise, and had it conveyed to her. It was returned to him unopened. The Marquise's servant brought it back about nightfall. The Count, sitting in the drawing-room listening, while his wife at the piano mangled a Caprice of Herold's, suddenly sprang up and rushed out to the Marquise, as if he were flying to an assignation. He dashed through a well-known gap into the park, and went slowly along the avenues, stopping now and again for a little to still the loud beating ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... Mr. Bundercombe hastened to push him out of sight. We heard the sound of strange voices in the hall. When the door was opened it was obvious that the whole house was lit up. From somewhere in the distance came the soft music of a piano. ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... shyness; Fly, flier, flyer, high-flier; Sly, slily, slyly, sliness, slyness; Ply, pliers, plyers, plying, complier; Dry, drier, dryer, dryly, dryness."—Chalmers's Abridgement of Todd's Johnson. "I would sooner listen to the thrumming of a dandyzette at her piano."—Kirkham's Elocution, p. 24. "Send her away; for she cryeth after us."—Felton's Gram., p. 140. "IVYED, a. Overgrown with ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... sixteenth week had become as rapid and certain as a reflex. At eight months, or a year before its first attempts at speaking, the infant distinguished between a tone and a noise, as shown by its pleasure on hearing the sounds of a piano; after the first year the child found satisfaction in itself striking the piano. In the twenty-first month it danced to music, and in the twenty fourth imitated song; but it is stated on the authority of other observers that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... built for the use of English families, there is, as was the case at Sandynugghur, a drawing- room as well as a dining-room, and this, being the ladies' especial domain, is generally furnished in European style, with a piano, light chintz ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... the labour market of the world. To do this she will have to sacrifice some of her present intelligence; it is impossible to imagine a genuinely intelligent human being becoming a competent trial lawyer, or buttonhole worker, or newspaper sub-editor, or piano tuner, or house painter. Women, to get upon all fours with men in such stupid occupations, will have to commit spiritual suicide, which is probably much further than they will ever actually go. Thus a shade of their present superiority to men will always remain, and with it a shade ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... Blue could talk of nothing but the King, and how glad he was to have seen him. In the evening, however, one of the young ladies began to play a hornpipe, the music of which Sir Henry, not without difficulty, had procured for her. True Blue pricked up his ears, and then, running to the piano, exclaimed, "You play it very well indeed, Miss Julia—that you do; but I wish that you could just hear Sam Smatch with his fiddle—he'd take the shine out of you, I think you'd say. Howsomdever, my lady, if ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... establishment of Sophia Vasilievna, which is directly opposite, is distinctly visible—the shining yellow parquet, draperies of a dark cherry colour on the doors, caught up with cords, the end of a black grand-piano, a pier glass in a gilt frame, and the figures of women in gorgeous dresses, now flashing at the windows, now disappearing, and their reflections in the mirrors. The carved stoop of Treppel, to the right, is brightly illuminated by a bluish electric ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... his son-in-law, coloured violently with something of a frightened look. He told Talboys that only a few months after his departure he and Helen came to live at Southampton, where she had obtained a few pupils for the piano; but her health failed, and she fell into a decline, of which she died. Broken-hearted, Talboys started for Liverpool to take ship for Australia, but failed to catch the steamer; returned to London, and accompanied Robert Audley on a long ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... house last night when all the final details had been arranged in a palm-shaded corner by the piano, our conversation covered by the chatter of the other guests. No one knew of our plan, it was a dear secret between us, but it would not have mattered very much if others had known that we were going into the country. I was always supposed ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... the drawing-room. The ladies were grouped together at one end, near the piano. Margot was among them. She was, as usual, dressed in white, and round the bottom of her gown there was an edging of snow-white fur. As we came in, she moved away from the piano to a sofa at some distance, and sank down ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... the greatest living masters introduced the harp into his works, he wrote for it just as though it were a piano—i.e., as though it were to be played upon with the thumb and four fingers. But it so happens that on that instrument the fourth finger is never used. Consequently, when it came to the point harpists could not play that gentleman's compositions: they had first to re-write them. Here ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... man now came with a drawer, in which there was much to be seen, both "tin boxes" and "balsam boxes," old cards, so large and so gilded, such as one never sees them now. And several drawers were opened, and the piano was opened; it had landscapes on the inside of the lid, and it was so hoarse when the old man played on it! and then he ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... with a string of twenty neckties (borrowed from Uncle Guy's room) dangling around her waist, over a combination of pink crepe and bluebird pajamas. At the back of her neck, in savage glee, was propped the piano feather duster, the same being somewhat supported by another necktie of Kelly green hue, that ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... do without it. To the Great House accordingly they went, to sit the full half hour in the old-fashioned square parlour, with a small carpet and shining floor, to which the present daughters of the house were gradually giving the proper air of confusion by a grand piano-forte and a harp, flower-stands and little tables placed in every direction. Oh! could the originals of the portraits against the wainscot, could the gentlemen in brown velvet and the ladies in blue satin have seen what was going on, have been conscious of ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... to play the piano. So did I, once. But I never let her know after I'd heard her play the first time. And she thought her playing was wonderful, the dear, fond girl! You know the sort, the mechanical one-two-three tum-tum-tum school-girl stuff. And now I'll tell you something ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... it on the same table, represents the art of the house; perhaps there is a portrait of the master of the house in the dining-room, grim-glancing from above the mantel-piece; and of the mistress over the piano up stairs; add to these some odious miniatures of the sons and daughters, on each side of the chimney-glass; and here, commonly (we appeal to the reader if this is an overcharged picture), the collection ends. The family goes to the Exhibition once a year, to the National Gallery ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... poured out some whiskey and water and lit a cigar, the lounging chairs somehow did not attract him. He moved about aimlessly in the circumscribed space, his hands in his pockets, his burly shoulders rounded, his face dulled and heavy as with a depression of doubt. The sound of the piano upstairs came intermittently to his ears. Often he ascended to the drawing-room to hear Julia play—and more often still, with all the doors open, he enjoyed the mellowed murmur of her music here at his ease in the big chair. But tonight he had no joy in the noise. More than once, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... and Miss Crawford seated herself on a pink rose, about the size of a Jersey cabbage, with two colossal buds, and rested her tired back against a similar group. At the first notes of the piano her watchful and smiling face relaxed and she nodded wearily in the background. It did not matter much. The young master was grave, silent, patient, conscientious. In fact, it did not matter at all. Having ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... between us to impart a relish to our friendship. Indifferent health, for he was delicate too, was one of the bonds between us. We were both fond of reading, of quiet walks and talks, and we hated crowds. He was a good musician, played the piano; but the guitar was the favourite accompaniment to his voice, a clear sweet tenor, and he sang well. I was not so susceptible to the "concord of sweet sounds" as he was, but could draw a little, paint a little, string rhymes together; and so we never failed to amuse and interest each other. He ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... disturbance which would have led him to seek other lodgings, could he have hoped to find any so cheap as these. The landlady's son, a lank youth of the clerk species, was wont to amuse himself from eight to ten with practice on a piano. By dint of perseverance he had learned to strum two or three hymnal melodies popularised by American evangelists; occasionally he even added the charm of his voice, which had a pietistic nasality not easily endured ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... a great deal of determination mingled with good humour. Usually in high spirits, he often displayed a boyish playfulness that resembled the gambols of a big good-natured dog. He was musical too, and would sing Annie Laurie for you at any time, accompanying himself on the piano. To practical joking he was rather addicted, and once I was his reluctant accomplice, but am glad to say it was the last time I ever engaged in such rude pleasantry. I can write of him now the more freely that he is no longer of this world. Excessive energy hastened his death. In 1901 ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... copies of beautiful pictures adorn the walls, and the best parlour, which used to be kept in a condition of deadly propriety for state occasions only, is evidently used in the course of daily life. A brand-new piano, with a pretty little girl seated before it, suggests advancing refinement, and the expression of the child's face, while she attempts the impossible task of stretching an octave, indicates despair. There is another little girl seated at a table darning with all ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... woman softly closed the door after them. With a wondering glance, Carmen looked about her. In the room at her right she caught a glimpse of women—beautiful, they seemed to her—clad in loose, low-cut, gaily colored gowns. There were men there, too; and some one sat at a piano playing sprightly music. She had seen pianos like that in Cartagena, and on the boat, and they had seemed to her things bewitched. In the room at the end of the hall men and women were dancing on a floor that seemed of polished glass. Loud talk, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... all was his customary couch in the study. That couch was dreadful to him, probably because of the oppressive thoughts he had had when lying there. It was unsatisfactory everywhere, but the corner behind the piano in the sitting room was better than other places: he had ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... is struck, half past six, and a bugle rings out a merry peal, on the middle deck. It is the turn-out bugle, and you can play it on the piano:— ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... and sighed, and said "Good Percival!" when his friend laughed at him. After dinner, he took Laura by the hand, and asked her if she would be "so sweet as to play to him." She complied, through sheer astonishment. He sat by the piano, with his watch-chain resting in folds, like a golden serpent, on the sea-green protuberance of his waistcoat. His immense head lay languidly on one side, and he gently beat time with two of his yellow-white fingers. He highly approved of the music, and tenderly admired Laura's ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... roses and sweet-peas, cut by Christine—her fairy daughter—lay ready to hand. Between them they filled the lofty room with fragrance and harmonies of delicate colour. Then Christine flew to her beloved piano; and Lilamani wandered away to her no less beloved rose-garden. Body and mind were restless. She could settle to nothing till she knew what had passed between Nevil and Roy. His boyish confidences and adorations of the night before had filled her cup to overflowing. She felt ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... officers of His Most Christian Majesty's ship Sappho, and several ladies and gentlemen of the city. We had some excellent music. Madame do Rego has an admirable voice, and there were several good singers and players on the piano. It was a more pleasant, polished evening than I had expected to pass in Pernambuco, especially now ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... a hundred pounds. This is his pay for work done and risk taken (that the goods which he buys may not appeal to his customers) during the years in which he has saved it. He might spend his hundred pounds on a motor cycle and a side-car, or on furniture, or a piano, and nobody would deny his right to do so. On the contrary he would probably be applauded for giving employment to makers of the articles that he bought. Instead of thus consuming the fruit of his work on his own amusement, and the ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... blocks, sketch-books, loose sheets of paper, newspapers, books, and more smudged rags. Next the outer door is an umbrella and hat stand, occupied partly by Louis' hats and cloak and muffler, and partly by odds and ends of costumes. There is an old piano stool on the near side of this door. In the corner near the inner door is a little tea-table. A lay figure, in a cardinal's robe and hat, with an hour-glass in one hand and a scythe slung on its back, smiles with inane malice at Louis, who, in a milkman's smock ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... inclined toward the rough too much, then certainly the new inclines distressingly toward the refined—the stage that once was so full of knockabout is now so full of stand-still; variety that was once a joy is now a bore. Just some uninteresting songs at the piano before a giddy drop is not enough these days; and there are too many of such. There is need of a greater activity for the eye. The return of the acrobat in a more modern dress would be the appropriate acquisition, for we still have appreciation for all those charming ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... rockers. Street after street he could recall, from the square about the "depot" to the outskirts, and through them all the dusty heat, the rockers, gigglers, the rustle of a shirt-sleeved father's newspaper, and the shrill coo-ees of the younger children. Finally, the piano—for he looked back farther than the all-conquering phonograph. He heard "Nita, ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... contained costly and elaborate collections and folios of music, a complete library of the entire world's best productions. The girl's harp—a masterpiece by Pestalozzi of Venice—stood at one side; on the other, a five hundred dollar Victrola, with a wonderful repertoire of records. But the grand piano itself dominated all, especially made for Catherine by Durand Freres, in Paris, and imported on the Billionaire's own yacht, the "Bandit." A wondrous instrument, this, finer even than the pipe-organ in an alcove at the far end of the room. It summed up all that the world's ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... he sang in the church choir, under the training of masters of increasing grades of skill, in his native village, at Malden, and in Boston. He early learned to play upon keyed instruments, the melodion, the piano, and the organ, the latter being his favorite. From this great encyclopaedia of tones, he loved to bring out grand harmonies. He used this instrument of many potencies, for enjoyment, as a means of culture, for the soothing of his spirits, and the resting of his brain. When ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... his sister telling of young Arthur's infatuation for the cheap actress, Miss Fotheringay, the story carries one along in the leisurely way of the last century. All the people are a delight, from Captain Costigan to Fowker, and from the French chef, who went to the piano for stimulus in his culinary work, to Blanche Amory and her amazing French affectations. ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... "There is more hope!" "There is no hope!" and finally "guilty" in all the cases was reported. The wife of a horrible German murderer who had strangled his employer's wife, while a female accomplice played the piano to divert her children's attention from her cries, swooned away at the news. O'Flynn's old mother went into hysterics and became quite uncontrollable in her grief when, a few minutes later the news, "Five years' ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... which were her delight. The room was furnished with all manner of odds and ends, flotsam and jetsam of innumerable sales attended by Aaron. There were Japanese screens, Empire sofas, mahogany chairs, Persian praying mats, Louis Quatorz tables, Arabic tiles, Worcester china, an antique piano that might have come out of the ark, and many other things of epochs which had passed away. Sylvia herself bloomed like a fair flower amidst this wreckage ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... immensely large one, with gleaming chandeliers, frescoed nymphs and cupids on the walls, a regular stage and a regular orchestra. A venerable man in gray hair and spectacles saws away at the big bass; a long-haired, professor-looking person struggles laboriously with the piano; there are two violinists, a horn, a trombone, a flute and a flageolet. On the wall is a placard where we read that the price for the first consommation is fifteen sous, but that subsequent consommations will be furnished ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... had fine intellectual powers. She was the delight of her teachers, for she could imbibe knowledge as a sponge absorbs water. On this particular day she was at her best during a very difficult lesson at the piano from a professor who came from London. Betty had always a passionate love of music, and to-day she revelled in it. She had been learning one of Chopin's Nocturnes, and now rendered it with exquisite pathos. ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... an escape! His visits to the little lodging-house overlooking the sea where Dahlia played the piano so enchantingly, and Mrs. Feverel, a solemn, rather menacing figure, played silently and mournfully continuous Patience, were less and less frequent. He was determined to break the matter off; it haunted his dreams, it troubled him all day; he was forced ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... its conclusion, and we all returned together, on the foreign plan, to coffee and cigars in the drawing-room. The women smoked, and drank liqueurs as well as coffee, with the men. One of them went to the piano, and a little impromptu ball followed, the ladies dancing with their cigarettes in their mouths. Keeping my eyes and ears on the alert, I saw an innocent-looking table, with a surface of rosewood, suddenly develop a substance of green cloth. At the same time, a neat ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... includes three sonatas and three partitas (generally classed as six sonatas) for violin alone; six sonatas for violin and piano, a large quantity of chamber music of one sort and another, a few orchestral suites, and about ten large volumes of music for the clavier and for ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... the owner so inclined, Ears to stick a blister behind; But as for hearing wisdom, or wit, Falsehood, or folly, or tell-tale-tit, Or politics, whether of Fox or Pitt, Sermon, lecture, or musical bit, Harp, piano, fiddle, or kit, They might as well, for any such wish, Have been buttered, done brown, and laid ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... perfectly well that every one of them has been singing in a high tenor in his bath before dinner. We all know the reason, but we don't take the obvious remedy. The only thing to do is to take all the furniture out of the drawing-room and put it in the bathroom—all except the piano and a few cane chairs. Then we shouldn't have those terrible noises in the early morning, and in the evening everybody would be a singer. I suppose that is what they do ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... great bother, at best. I wish they could be abolished. They are always slamming, punching holes in the plastering with their knobs, creaking on their hinges, bruising the piano, pinching babies' fingers, and making old folks see stars when they get up in the night to look for burglars. Heavy curtains are infinitely more graceful, equally warm, and not half so stubbornly unmanageable. Then ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... usually only a little of the last, and entirely hate the prudent applications of that: being unacquainted, except as they chance here and there to pick up a broken piece of information, with either grammar, rhetoric, music, [Footnote: Being able to play the piano and admire Mendelssohn is not knowing music.] astronomy, or geometry; and are not only unacquainted with logic, or the use of reason, themselves, but instinctively antagonistic to its use ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... to feel that Bathilde had become one of the necessities of his life; but as he could not pass the whole night at his window, he then closed it, and came into his room, although only to follow up the recollections with which it was filled. He opened his piano, and passed his fingers over the keys, at the risk of re-exacting the anger of the lodger on the third floor. From the piano he passed to the unfinished portrait of Bathilde. At length he slept, listening again in his mind to the air sung by Mademoiselle Berry, whom he finished ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... day Jim grew desperate enough to call on Charity. She was out, but expected in at any moment. He sat down to wait for her. The room, the books, the piano—all spoke of her lovingly and lovably. He went to the piano and found there the song she had played for him once in ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... Miss Vaughan breakfasted alone at nine o'clock. At such times, she was accustomed to talk over household affairs with the maid, and after breakfast would visit the kitchen and make a tour of the grounds and garden. The remainder of her day would be spent in reading, in playing the piano, in doing little household tasks, or in walking about the grounds with her father. Yes, sometimes the yogi would join them, and there would be long discussions. After dinner, in the library, there would also ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... her reputation had led me to expect. She received me in a shabby little sitting-room littered with uncut books and newspapers, many of which I saw at a glance were French. One side of it was occupied by an open piano, surmounted by a jar full of white roses. They perfumed the air; they seemed to me to exhale the pure aroma of Pickering's devotion. Buried in an arm-chair, the object of this devotion was reading the Revue des Deux Mondes. The purpose of my ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... other wits, was a second son. Ladies of sixty or seventy well remember the name of Hook as that which accompanied their earliest miseries. It was in learning Hook's exercises, or primers, or whatever they were called, that they first had their fingers slapped over the piano-forte. The father of Theodore, no doubt, was the unwitting cause of much unhappiness to many a young lady in her teens. Hook pere was an organist at Norwich. He came up to town, and was engaged at Marylebone Gardens and at Vauxhall; so that Theodore had no excuse for being of decidedly ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... this situation. BONAR LAW had become a serious danger to the State (me), he was fomenting rebellion against authority (mine), and he would have to go. I telegraphed instructions, and within half an hour BONAR had left Pudsey for Farnborough as a grand piano. To-night he is strapped on to an army aeroplane and launched into the Ewigkeit. The aeroplane has no wireless installation and will, I am informed, stop nowhere ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... and boxes of matches, around with them, for the sole purpose of giving the desired effect to any snatches from Herr Wagner's work they may take the notion to whistle. But in the sanctity of our homes, around our firesides, in the front-parlor, where the melodeon or the newly hired piano has been set up, it is there that Herr Wagner's name will be revered, and his masterpiece repeated o'er and o'er. The libretto is not above criticism; it strikes us that there is not enough of it. The probability is that Herr Wagner ran out ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... sister had always considered the senator's son a very promising young man. Consequently, it can well be imagined that the four young people spent a most enjoyable time that evening in the mansion. The girls played on the piano and all sang, and then some rugs were pushed aside, a phonograph was brought into action, and they danced a number of the latest steps, with ...
— Dave Porter and His Double - The Disapperarance of the Basswood Fortune • Edward Stratemeyer
... o'clock a special orchestra, special even in a day of special orchestras, arrived at Delmonico's, and its members, seating themselves arrogantly around the piano, took up the burden of providing music for the Gamma Psi Fraternity. They were headed by a famous flute-player, distinguished throughout New York for his feat of standing on his head and shimmying with his shoulders while he played the latest jazz on his flute. During his performance the lights ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... The rats and mice were having their innings in the schoolrooms, and the big bell was getting rusty for want of exercise. The door of the Lower Third had not had a panel kicked out of it for a whole week, and Dr Allsuch's pictures and sofas and piano were all stacked up in the Detention Room while their ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... dreamed she was vindictive or even resentful. It was not in anger she had forsaken him; it was in simple submission to hard reality, to the stern logic of life. This came home to him when he sat with her again in the room in which her late aunt's conversation lingered like the tone of a cracked piano. She tried to make him forget how much they were estranged, but in the very presence of what they had given up it was impossible not to be sorry for her. He had taken from her so much more than she had taken from him. He argued with her again, told her ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... hands," he writes, "and I am certainly not skillful. All I have ever been able to do in that way is to net and do the simpler forms of needlework; but it seems more natural to me to do, or try to do, everything of that sort, and to play on the piano, rather than to shoot or play games. I may add that I am fonder of babies than many women, and am generally considered to be surprisingly capable of holding them! Certainly I enjoy doing so. As ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... corral, reasoning that if he were going to be watched, he would be watched no matter where he went; but he ate his supper in the dining room of the Plaza Hotel, and sat in the lobby talking with a couple of facetious drummers until the mechanical piano in the movie show across the ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... noises. Sixth week, starting at slight noises even in sleep; quieted by mother's singing. Seventh week, fright at noise is greater (83). Sensibility to musical tones, ditto. Eighth week, tones of piano ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... sweet port wine for which he would curse the steward and the whole committee of a club; he bears even with the cantankerous old maiden aunt; he beats time when darling little Fanny performs her piece on the piano; and smiles when wicked, lively little Bobby upsets the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... heads proudly above the works of art which surround them, and in splendid Chinese cages, birds of gorgeous plumage have learned to caress the rosy lips of their young mistress, or perch triumphantly on her snowy finger. Here are books, too, and music—a harp—a piano—while through a half open door leading from a little recess over which a multaflora is taught to twine its graceful tendrils, a glimpse may be caught of rosy silken hangings shading the couch where the queen of this little realm nightly ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... when the vital energies are absorbed in the rapid development of the body, the girl is often "cramming" for examinations and cooped in close schoolrooms for six or eight hours daily; not only that, but at home she is often practicing and taking lessons on the piano in connection with the full school work. The result too often is an active bright mind in an enfeebled body, ill-adapted to subserve the functions for which it was framed, easily disordered, and prone to act abnormally to ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... behind her, and then opened them again and whispered, "Please don't be long," and disappeared. He waited, smiling, to see if she would make another appearance, but she did not, and he heard her touch the keys of the piano at the other end of the drawing-room. And so, still smiling and with her last words sounding in his ears, he walked slowly up the stairs and knocked at the door of the bishop's study. The bishop's room was not ecclesiastic in its character. ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... one was able to come down. The house was furnished in the easy unpretentiousness that prevailed in the South in other days. Cool matting covered all the floors, the hallways, and bedchambers. The dining-room opened into a drawing-room, where Kate and Olympia took turns at the big piano. The day was divided, English fashion, into breakfast, luncheon, dinner, and supper, the latter as late as nine o'clock in the night. Jack being unprovided with regimentals, Vincent wore civilian garb, to spare the "prisoner" (as Jack jocosely called himself) mortification. Gray was the "only ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... Whitestone Hall sat Pluma Hurlhurst, running her white, jeweled fingers lightly over the keyboard of a grand piano, but the music evidently failed to charm her. She arose listlessly and walked toward the window, which opened out upon the ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... into a more important place among educational influences now that the old superstition of making every child play the piano is passing away. It was an injustice both to the right reason of a child and to the honour of music when it was forced upon those who were unwilling and unfit to attain any degree of excellence in it. We are renouncing these ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... sows, and so on. The old boar is still at the stables of this inn, but I hear he is to come on board with the sailing orders: but he is very savage, and is therefore left on shore to the very last moment. Now really, Peter, what with the squealing of the pigs and his wife's piano, we are almost driven mad. I don't know which is the worse of the two; if you go aft you hear the one, if you go forward you hear the other, by way of variety, and that, they say, is charming. But, is it not shocking that such a beautiful frigate should ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... age of the other sex: a party never seemed complete from which he was absent: there was no one whose hand she more willingly accepted for the dance, or whose praise was more welcome when she rose from the piano: but though the emotions she felt in his presence were so agreeable, she had not suspected them to be those of love. Her brother had abruptly awakened her to the reality. In the simplicity of her innocence, and with somewhat of a maiden ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... to each other that evening. Argemone was called to the piano; and Lancelot took up the Sporting Magazine, and read himself to sleep till the ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... mental excitement of the discordant struggle, and comfortably conscious that as his residence was "detached," no obtrusive neighbor could either warn him to desist, or set up an opposition nuisance next door by constant practice on the distressingly over-popular piano. One thing very much in his favor was, that he never manifested any desire to perform in public. No one had ever heard him play, . . he pursued his favorite amusement in solitude, and was amply satisfied, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... among the despised nouveaux riches, nor that there were so many flowers even in California. Her own coming-out party in the dark double parlors of the old house among the eucalyptus trees, whose moans and sighs could be heard above the thin music of piano and violin, had been so formal and dull that she had cried herself to sleep after the last depressed member of the old set had left on the stroke of midnight. Even Aileen's high mocking spirits had failed her, and she had barely been able ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... uneasy, they were so long gone, for I knew well what a lot of country lay between us and my own mission station. I was due there by sunrise or soon after, on the morrow. Mrs. Kent was strumming away on the piano old dance tunes that I remembered barrel-organ melodies of now remote days, days when a bi-weekly shave sufficed me. I stood in the doorway and beat time. Whenever were we going to get started at this rate? At last the mules came cantering up ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... Mrs. Cricklander saw that a storm was gathering upon Mr. Hanbury-Green's brow and, admirable hostess that she was, she decided to smooth the troubled waters, so she went across the room to the piano, and began to play a seductive valse, while John Derringham followed her and leaned upon the lid, and tried to feel as devoted as ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... in the open air, though a little trying to nervous ladies in the front rows of an opera-house. This is the celebrated "KilkennischeKatzenMotiv" (Motive of Mortal Combat). It is a syncopated movement, and when given at the piano, is to be played furiously, first with one hand and then with the other, till the performer is ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... him. Nothing was known then of Paine's possessions. Later the French family with whom Paine lived opened an old hair trunk they found in the garret. In this trunk they found nearly half a million dollars in gold, bank notes, and securities. Chickering, the piano man, came forward then and said that some years before Paine gave him a package wrapped up in an old bandana handkerchief for safe keeping. He had opened this package and found that it contained $300,000 in bank notes. Other possessions of Paine's were found. Relatives came ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... Kinnwell, Sir William and Lady Rowly, the Spanish Ambassador and his wife, the Brazilian Ambassador, Sir Charles Beresford, Sir William Abdy, Mr George Harrison, Mr Kelly Addenston. "Twenty-three," says Mr Montefiore, "sat down to table. Moschelles came in the evening, played on the piano, and accompanied Miss Rothschild. It was near twelve before the party broke up." Mr Montefiore was highly gratified with the result of the conversations he had with several influential noblemen on the subject he had so ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... at Saluda Seminary took place on Friday evening, May 1. Visitors overflowed the schoolrooms before the appointed hour. After the introductory march had been rendered by one of the music pupils on the beautiful Estey piano which adorned the platform, there was not a standing place left for seeing nor hearing. The young people kept everybody interested and pleased for three hours, by readings, recitations, instrumental music, and ...
— American Missionary, Volume 50, No. 8, August, 1896 • Various
... explain to you the reappearance (in a very much altered conception and form) of many of my compositions, on which I, as piano player and piano composer, am obliged to lay some stress, as they form, to a certain extent, the expression of a closed period of ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... by the fire, her hands stretched out to the blaze. Seeing that the fire was low, and remembering the chill of her hands in his, he looked around for the wood-basket which was generally kept in a corner behind the piano. ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... drawing-room of London a few people were scattered about, listening to a soprano voice that was singing to the accompaniment of a piano. The sound of the voice came from an inner room, towards which most of these people were looking earnestly. Only one or two seemed indifferent to the fascination of ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... window, and went back to find the doctor and Helen all smiles, and ready to joke instead of scold. Then he went to the piano, and turned over the music, the airs and songs making him feel more and more sad, and again and again he found ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... Titian sketching patterns for ball-dresses. But afterwards he played Home, sweet Home, with three variations—quite the most wonderful thing I have ever heard in music. Though I was close to the piano, the motion of the fingers was entirely invisible—a mere mist of rapidity; the hands moving slowly and softly, and the variation, in the ear, like a murmur of a light fountain, far away. It was beautiful too to see the girls' faces ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... the following morning we reached Moldeoen, where the steamer landed us on a rock on which were a few acres of grass and half a dozen wooden houses. We had a good deal of luggage with us, also some casks, cases, and barrels of provisions, and a piano-forte, as our place of sojourn is somewhat out of the way and far removed from civilised markets. A few poverty-stricken natives stood on the rude stone pier as we landed, and slowly assisted us to unload. At the time I conceived ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... the house what they thought Donal would like. But in the castle they kept for him the rooms lady Arctura had called her own. There he gathered the books, and a few other of the more immediately personal possessions of his wife—her piano for one—upon which he taught himself to play a little; and thither he betook himself often on holidays, and always on Sunday evenings. What went on then I leave to the imagination of the reader who knows that alone one may meet many, sitting still may ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... full brow. But she had horridly low relations, and as I know, from sad experience, self-preservation is the first instinct of humanity. Gracia Vaughn, you must not forget the old days of poverty, and toil, and vexation over the piano in Madame Fay's back parlor, where you were an under-paid music teacher! Be careful that an unwary step does not precipitate you again into the depths from which Cecil Vaughn rescued you! That would be misery, indeed, after ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... continually increasing power. This is governed by law the same as are all things in our lives, and all things in the universe about us. Every act and advancement made by the musician is in full accordance with law. No one commencing the study of music can, for example, sit down to the piano and play the piece of a master at the first effort. He must not conclude, however, nor does he conclude, that the piece of the master cannot be played by him, or, for that matter, by any one. He begins to practise the piece. The law of the mind that ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... perplexity. Then suddenly she recollected. She had been in the choir at school. She had sung hymns every morning at prayers. The fat German governess, an exile from the Fatherland and deeply sentimental, used to play the piano and teach the choir. There were always tears in her eyes when she played that particular tune. The girls understood that in some way it meant a great deal to her, was perhaps the tune of some national ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... fact applies in a general way to every state and every home. Look about, where you are sitting now. How many things are there in the room just where you are,—there is a table, a chair, a shoe, a coat, a necktie, a cigar, a lampshade, a piano, a basket—for all of these you are ...
— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson
... a merchant, not for anything. I won't! As if I was brought up for that, and learned French[1], and to play the piano, and to dance! No, no; get him wherever you want to, but get me ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... pretty well for a time. At first they were only mildly inconvenienced. Things used to disappear mysteriously, and turn up in unexpected places. Slipperton's pince-nez, for example, were lost, and found inside the piano. And Mrs. Slipperton's "false front" would be moved in the night from the dressing-table to the brass knob of the bed-post, even after she took to pinning it to the toilet cover. Things like that; irritating, but ...
— The Psychical Researcher's Tale - The Sceptical Poltergeist - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • J. D. Beresford
... of harmony between our two eyes, which makes them act in unison. Likewise there is an unbreakable continuity of relation in the physical world between heat and cold, light and darkness, motion and rest, as between the bass and treble notes of a piano. That is why these opposites do not bring confusion in the universe, but harmony. If creation were but a chaos, we should have to imagine the two opposing principles as trying to get the better of each other. But the universe is not under martial law, arbitrary and ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... if I could dance forever," cried Polly, when Amy Garrett turned away from the piano and declared she would play no more—and she still pirouetted on one foot, to come up red as a ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... watched all her movements, to show him how unconcerned she was, she began to go about the grounds, to take long walks in all directions, and whenever she returned to the house, to play for hours upon the piano. Her determination to keep up her courage had the effect of keeping down her despondency, and her vigorous exercise was an unmixed benefit, so that there was a radiant beauty in her face, and a haughty dignity that made her look like the absolute ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... garrulous, "neighbourly" woman, or one who can do little save strum on the piano or make embroidery as intricate as it is useless, means divorce or murder. For him, sweetness, gentleness, self-control, sound common sense, shrewdness, and domestic virtues are incomparably superior to any mental brilliance or physical ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... three hundred students four stories high." "HOUSEKEEPER.—A highly respectable middle-aged Person who has been filling the above Situation with a gentleman for upwards of eleven years and who is now deceased is anxious to meet a similar one." "TO PIANO-FORTE MAKERS.—A lady keeping a first-class school requiring a good piano, is desirous of receiving a daughter of the above in exchange for the same." "The Moor, seizing a bolster boiling over with rage and jealousy, smothers her." ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... teeth, then a Gooseberry Tart marked "Stolen", then an Arithmetic with a mean sort of face, rulers for legs, and compasses for arms; then a Clock that had been meddled with by somebody (Rudolf felt certain it was not by him) and kept striking all the time; then a Piano with a lot of horrid exercises waiting to be practised; then last of all a familiar clumsy figure with one red glaring eye—their old enemy, ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... body, that she had forgotten the mind, so that he had no more spiritual matter in him than sufficed to keep his blood hot, and enable his sensual organs to work out their own selfish gratifications; or, to perpetrate a metaphor, he was all the polished mahogany of a piano, without any more musical springs than might respond to one keynote of selfishness. And surely Anabella had approved herself to the fop to some purpose; for when our sempstress with her bundle had got into the parlour of the fine lady, she encountered ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... and long enough, too, were not made for fancy work and parlor tricks. They would have looked in place round the handle of a spade or the throttle of an engine, while Sam's seemed made for the keyboard of a piano. ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... lady does not know what to do with her two or three bouquets at a musicale or a dinner, so they are laid away on a table. The only thing that can be done is to sit after dinner with them in her lap, and the prima donna at a musicale lays hers on the grand piano. ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... "typifying innocence," and marching to minor music played upon a piano, Stevens was escorted several times around the darkened room, stopping from time to time at the station of some officer, to receive highly improving lectures. Every time he was asked if he were willing to do anything, or believed anything, he said "Yes." Finally, ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... murmured. "Mr. Arnold," she added, looking at me eagerly, "I can paint and sing and play the piano. Can't people earn money sometimes by doing these things? I would work—oh, I am not afraid to work. Couldn't I stay here for ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Dorsetshire Colleys, you know, although they are exceedingly nice people, as I have no doubt the other Colleys are, too, when you know them, but we don't. Well, after dinner we were a little dull and rather at a loss, because Juliet, my niece, you know, had cut her finger and couldn't play the piano excepting with the left hand, and that is so monotonous as well as fatiguing, and the Colleys are not musical, excepting Adolphus, who plays the trombone, but he hadn't got it with him, and then, fortunately, ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... not hitherto gone. For such an undertaking consciousness is needed, but let us see how far we are able to hand over its work to unconsciousness. Suppose, when entirely ignorant of music, I decide to learn to play the piano. Evidently it will require the minutest watchfulness. Approaching the strange instrument with some uneasiness, I try to secure exactly that position on the stool which will allow my arms their proper ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... sit here," begged the old lady, when I had seated myself on the porch to sip a glass of milk for which I had asked her. "The Yankee troops will go right through this house. They will break up the piano and every stick of furniture, and leave the place in ruins. You are sure to ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... I taught her to read; I guided her little hands to touch the piano keys." And at these faded memories, the Cavaliere's eyes glittered more brightly. Rowland half expected him to proceed, with a little flash of long-repressed passion, "And now—and now, sir, they treat me as you observed the other day!" But the Cavaliere only ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... to do somethin'," groaned Newt Spratt, whose wife was organist in the Pond Road Church. "She'll bust that piano all to smash if ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... green silk curtains just shading the French window which was opened to the soft July air bearing the scent of the roses and jessamine; its low easy-chairs, of various patterns, its oval table with a cover of white and gold, its neat cabinet piano, the pretty dainty chimney ornaments, the few cool light sketches in water-colour that adorned the walls, the small book-case with a few charmingly bound volumes which filled up one recess by the fireplace, and the china closet ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... folks at the other end of the room. They formed a pretty sight, he thought. Lavender was a good-looking fellow enough, and there was something pleasing in the quiet and assiduous fashion in which he waited upon Sheila, and in the almost timid way in which he spoke to her. Sheila herself sat at the piano, clad all in slate-gray silk, with a narrow band of scarlet velvet round her neck; and it was only by a chance turning of the head that Ingram caught the tender and handsome profile, broken only by the outward sweep ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... corner and came into a narrow street that throbbed with the joyous melody of a piano-organ. His heart leapt up. The roadway bubbled with Jewish children, mainly girls, footing it gleefully in the graying light, inventing complex steps with a grace and an abandon that lit their eyes with sparkles and painted deeper flushes on their olive cheeks. A ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... The piano stood on the left, passing down from the parlor door towards the rear of the room, and behind it was a small inlaid table covered with books, and a large easy chair designed for lazy reading. Any person in the chair would be within twelve inches ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... obscurity which envelops them, you would feel what a divine consolation is music! And they shout for joy, they beam with happiness when a teacher says to them, "You will become an artist." The one who is first in music, who succeeds the best on the violin or piano, is like a king to them; they love, they venerate him. If a quarrel arises between two of them, they go to him; if two friends fall out, it is he who reconciles them. The smallest pupils, whom he teaches to play, regard ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... answered to the notes of the tuning-fork, and these vibrated at the rate of five hundred and twelve vibrations per second. Other hairs vibrated to other notes, which were those of the middle octave of the piano and the next above it. Mayer also found that certain of these vibrations corresponded with the notes produced by the 'song' of the female mosquito. Consequently, when she begins to 'sing,' her tune, ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... by incandescent lamps, and there was even a small automatic piano worked by the electric current, on which ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... "corresponding secretary of the A. T. L. A. If you had only come sooner you could have met her. What were you asking? Oh, yes! about Gerald's music. Why, you could no more imagine Gerald without music, than you could think of a bird without wings. He would simply perish without a piano. When we are abroad we rent one if we are only going to be in a place ten days. His Papa can't understand this, but then Mr. Ivy is not musical, poor dear; he really doesn't know a fugue from ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... voice, as in her body, there is always a reserve of energy, a dignified self-respect; there is never any self-abandonment. She has sung first in French, now she comes on in an Italian air, and afterwards is not too coyly reticent in taking an encore which is in English, to a piano accompaniment, and when that is over she hastens to bring the accompanist by the hand to her side before the audience, and bows, sweetly and graciously, with a gesture of the whole body, yet again with a ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... simple justice to clear Hale of that charge, but she saw such a terrified appeal in her step-mother's face that she kept her peace, let Hale suffer for that, too, and walked out into her garden. Never once had her piano been opened, her books had lain unread, and from her lips, during those days, came no song. When she was not at work, she was brooding in her room, or she would walk down to Uncle Billy's and sit at the mill with him while the old man ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... for the evening dress of modern civilization, and went at once to the drawing-room. Here all was luxury, nothing to suggest the privations of a new country. A thick red carpet covered the floor, red arras the walls; the music of Mozart and Beethoven was on the grand piano. The furniture was rich and comfortable, the large carved table was covered with French ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Railway Company's antiquated cars, to soft coal smoke belched forth from factory chimneys, are subject to control by the New York City Department of Health. The Essex Street resident who keeps a pig in the cellar, and the Riverside Drive house-holder who pounds his piano at 1 A.M. to the detriment of his neighbor's slumber, are alike amenable ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... to do, she wandered to the piano, and finding an old music book, turned its pages, playing snatches of "Monastery Bells" and "Listen to the Mocking-bird." She was putting a good deal of feeling into "I'm a Pilgrim, and I'm a Stranger," when a sound behind ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... the same use as the study of writing, grammar, or piano-playing. In learning to write we have to think precisely how each letter is formed, how one letter is connected with another, where to use capitals, where to punctuate and the like. But after we have become proficient in writing, we do all this without once thinking explicitly of ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... adjusted it he could not help recognizing that it was exceedingly becoming. He tore a tie and destroyed two collars, however, before the result satisfied him, and his nerves were at leaping pitch when staccato chords upon the piano announced that the concert had begun. He found a seat in the farthest corner of the saloon, and waited, penciling feverish circles upon the green-topped table to ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... She looked thoughtfully round the room—at the little square piano with brass inlayings, at the window-curtains, at the lamp, at the fair and dark kings and queens on the card-table, and finally at the inverted face of Lucetta Templeman, whose large lustrous eyes had such an odd effect ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... South to the North. I saw a room comfortably furnished, with a fire smouldering in a porcelain stove. In a corner stood a stripped Christmas-tree, with its candles burned out. Against the wall between the two doors was a piano, on which a man was playing—a man who twisted his head now and again to look over his shoulder, sometimes at another and younger man standing by the stove, sometimes at a young woman who was dancing alone in the centre of the room. ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... fish of some 3 lbs. My nephew played the tarpon for nearly two hours; the fish fought splendidly, shooting continuously into the air, a curved glittering bar of silver, 180 lbs. of giant gleaming herring, when the line (a stout piano wire) suddenly snapped as he was being reeled in. A tarpon fisherman has a leathern "bucket" strapped in front of him, in which to rest the butt of his rod, otherwise the strain would be too great. Whilst my ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... down at the piano, whilst her brother lay on the sofa, his hands clasped beneath his head. Dora did not play badly, but an absentmindedness which was commonly observable in her had its effect upon the music. She at length broke off idly in the middle of a passage, ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... has long had a valuable votary in the person of William Appo, an accomplished pianist. Mr. Appo has been a teacher of the piano forte, for more than twenty years, alternately in the cities of New York and Philadelphia, and sometimes in Baltimore. His profession extends amongst the citizens generally, from the more moderate in circumstances, to the ladies and daughters of the most wealthy gentlemen ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... queried further, and, as he replied affirmatively: "Then the Con. of course?"—an enigmatic question that needed to be explained. "You're piano, are you not?" she went on. "I thought so. It is hardly possible to mistake the hands"—here she just glanced at her own, which, large, white, and well formed, were lying on the table. "With strings, you know, the right hand is as a ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... had been music, Russell at the piano, and Gwendolyn and Belle with their violins, and she had sat upon the sofa by the gracious, new-found friend, who stroked her rough hand gently with her white jewelled fingers, and talked to her softly, ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black
... a shelf of books from the library. Then I brought the piano, because the youngsters ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... sittin' right there in the room, there's a lot doin' that she ain't in on. Trust Vee. Say, she can drum out classical stuff on the piano and fire a snappy line of repartee at me all the while, just loud enough for me to catch and no more, without battin' an eye. Say, I'm gettin' quite a musical education, just helpin' to stall off Auntie that way. And you should see the cute schemes Vee puts over—settin' a framed photo ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... a moist, flushed Priscilla. "That looks nice. You haven't got very far yet, have you? Never mind. Things go a lot faster after you've done 'em a while. Why, when I first tried to play the piano, my fingers went so slow, they just made me ache. Now they ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... invariably be a musicale— generally a quartette, with a few connoisseurs to listen and to criticise. Then the piano would be drawn out from its corner and the lid propped up, so that Max Unger of the "Harmonie" could find a place for his 'cello behind it, and there still be room for the inventor with his violin—a violin with a tradition, for Ole Bull had once played on it and in that same room, too, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... professionals had done their work there was a little pause, succeeded by the slight buzz that spoke of expectation. "Miss Pynsent is going to play," Mrs. Murray said to Sydney, putting up her long-handled eyeglass and looking expectantly towards the grand piano. "Oh, now, we shall ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... leaning lightly against a pillar by the fountain. "I never hear a pianist, however great and famous, but I see the little cream-colored hammers within the piano bobbing up and down like acrobatic brownies. I never hear the plaudits of the crowd for the artist and watch him return to bow his thanks, but I mentally demand that these little acrobats, each resting on an individual pedestal, and weary from his efforts, shall appear ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... you would have seen that the women had a rest room of their own where they could eat their lunch in comfort—a rest room with couches, and easy chairs, and palms and flowers, and a piano, and a talking machine, and a floor that you could dance on, if you felt like dancing immediately before or after lunch. And how the eight Josiahs would have stared at that happy, swaying throng in its Turkish overalls—especially on Friday ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... everyday coat, and go with you to her for an evening. No sort of etiquette is necessary there, my dear boy! You're learned, you know, and fond of literature and music'—(there actually was in Aratov's study a piano on which he sometimes struck minor chords)—'and in her house there's enough and to spare of all those goods!... and you'll meet there sympathetic people, no nonsense about them! And after all, you really can't at your age, with your ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... Andover for music lessons—piano and organ. A valuable friend was found in Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who had just published her Gates Ajar. She invited me to her study and wanted to know what I meant to accomplish in life and urged me to write. ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... can I get along now! My piano is gone and how can I give lessons without it! I will have to go back ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... by members of noble English families: 'the caresses of the great' may be lavished on athletes, and actors, and musicians, and Home's remarkable performances were quite enough to make him welcome in country houses. Moreover, he played the piano, the accordion, and other musical instruments. For his mysterious 'gift' he might be invited to puzzle and amuse royal people (not in England), and continental emperors, and kings. But he did much more than what Houdin or Alexis, a conjuror and a clairvoyant, ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... pretty obeisance, and bade her good night. Hesper returned her adieu kindly, but neither shook hands with her nor rang the bell to have her shown out Mary found her own way, however, and presently was breathing the fresh air of the twilight fields on her way home to her piano and her books. ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... was five years old the 21st of January, and I had such a happy birthday. In the morning when I got up I found at the foot of my crib six books of natural history full of pictures for little folks, a piano, a box of colors, and two dancing bears, one black and one brown. And when I went down to the dining-room, on my tray was a beautiful cup and saucer, and on the cup, in gold letters, "A Gift." And in my chair was a box with twenty-five ...
— Harper's Young People, February 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... as a bored musician, listening to the piano-antics of defective children, might have regarded the playing of a disguised Paderewski. Wherefore, he had waved the dog to one side while he judged the lesser entrants, and then had given him ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... child is longing for a pot of sugar candy? Then rub your eyes, you ecclesiastical bats, and let me show you the 'outcome' of all this wise and learned chat, with which you edify one another. You know she beguiled me into giving her lessons on the organ, as well as the piano, and yesterday when I went over to the church at instruction hour, I was astonished at a prelude, which she had evidently improvised. Screened from her view, I listened till she finished playing. Of course I praised ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the Handelian form, words and music by Samuel Butler and Henry Festing Jones: MS. of the piano score in the British Museum. MS. of the orchestral score ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... began to feel that Bathilde had become one of the necessities of his life; but as he could not pass the whole night at his window, he then closed it, and came into his room, although only to follow up the recollections with which it was filled. He opened his piano, and passed his fingers over the keys, at the risk of re-exacting the anger of the lodger on the third floor. From the piano he passed to the unfinished portrait of Bathilde. At length he slept, listening again in his mind to ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... and S.—or did when last inspected. It commands a magnificent view of the back gardens of the next street, where a weekly regatta is held every Monday. For lovers of music there is a piano next door and five gramophones within audible distance; an organ plays every ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... other on the stairs. If a stranger had entered the house that day, he might have imagined that an unexpected disaster had happened in it, instead of an unexpected necessity for a journey to London. Nothing proceeded in its ordinary routine. Magdalen, who was accustomed to pass the morning at the piano, wandered restlessly about the staircases and passages, and in and out of doors when there were glimpses of fine weather. Norah, whose fondness for reading had passed into a family proverb, took up book after book from table and shelf, and laid them ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... by the English, or made to dig trenches." The whole scene was so comic that I sat down and laughed, and the climax was reached when the cock-sparrow, who had always talked so big of what he was going to do and to say to the Boers, crawled under the old grand piano in the farther corner of the big room. I was forced to tell him that no American or Englishman could be found in such an ignominious position, should the house be searched, and I even assured the little ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... instrument save the tambourine—my highest success otherwise has been to finger out "God save the Queen" and "We won't go home till morning" on the ocarina—and to this day a person able to play the piano or the fiddle seems possessed of an uncanny gift; but in that remote period of my fresh rescue from the gutter, an executant appeared something superhuman. I stared at him with stupid open mouth. He played what I afterwards learned was one of Brahms's Hungarian dances. His lank figure and long ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... bowls of roses, jars of pink carnations and occasionally a vase of pink orchids were on mantel, low bookcases or piano. And sometimes the odor of a cigarette or a burning pastille of Oriental fragrance, added to the Bohemian effect which is, oftener than not, discernible by ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... speak to my pianist about Wagner's Lohengrin; he plays with great taste and feeling, and I purchased a fine Parisian piano to enable him to go ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... passages, so they were not only quite safe from shells but were exceedingly interesting and picturesque. We had several services for the men and one for a field ambulance which made its home in the Deaf and Dumb Asylum. In a large room in the Asylum there was a good piano, so it enabled us to use the place at one time as a church and at another as a ballroom. There was a strange charm about dear old Arras which is quite indescribable. In spite of the ruined buildings and the damaged grass-grown streets, there was the haunting beauty of a quiet medievalism about ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... years old. They were very pleasant-looking, of olive complexions. Their hair was tied in a knot behind, with a wreath of flowers round the knot; they had large gold ear-rings and European dresses. One played very nicely on the piano, while the rest sang very nicely a funny song, which shows the native way of thinking about some of our customs. They sang some nice hymns, and repeated some pieces, as the 'Wreck of the Hesperus,' which was given at the examination of ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... heard me playing on the piano, for I thumped as loud as ever I could; but he did not come in. It seems to me he is trying 'to cool off,' as we girls in the bindery used ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... their houses so that they could go and lay their hands on it in the darkest night. I'll bet they could in our house. From end to end it is kept looking as if we had shut it up and gone to Europe,—not a book, not a paper, not a glove, or any trace of a human being in sight; the piano shut tight, the bookcases shut and locked, the engravings locked up, all the drawers and closets locked. Why, if I want to take a fellow into the library, in the first place it smells like a vault, and I have to unbarricade windows, and unlock and rummage for half ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... few days, and she had obtained permission to accompany him to Old Point. Very pretty, she seemed, in her travelling hat and flowing robes; and he wore a handsome new uniform with prodigious shoulder-bars. There was a piano in the saloon, where another young lady of the party performed during the evening, and the bride and groom accompanied her with a song. It was the popular Federal parody of "Gay ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... sort of home we wanted, but we were willing to begin humbly. This was not because we were averse to starting at the top. Both Mother and I had then, and have now, a fondness for the best things of life. We should have liked a grand piano, and a self-making ice box, and a servant, and an automobile right off! But less than five hundred dollars capital and twenty-eight dollars a week salary ...
— Making the House a Home • Edgar A. Guest
... his thoughts by singing louder and louder the favorite melody of the day, Marlborough s'en va-t-en guerre. But Josephine had the satisfaction that Hortense was not only an excellent performer on the piano and the harp, but that she could also write original compositions, whose softness and harmonious combinations made them popular throughout France. Another satisfaction was, that Eugene sang, in a fine ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... tell me about her school life. She began at once to enumerate all her different studies—piano, style, chronology of the Kings of France, sewing, drawing, catechism, deportment... I could never remember them all! She still held in her hands, all unconsciously, the two ends of her skipping-rope, and she raised and lowered ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... seen, owing to the rapidity of the vibrations, although a scale of an octave may be sung; in the lower notes, however, the vocal cords are seen not so closely approximated as in the very high notes. This may account for the difficulty experienced in singing high notes piano. Sir Felix Semon in a Friday evening lecture at the Royal Institution showed some remarkable photographs, by Dr. French, of the larynx of two great singers, a contralto and a high soprano, during vocalisation, ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... Quick we put piano where it can sing best, chairs all in circle. Big spot in middle for tree, which comes at very ...
— Mr. Bamboo and the Honorable Little God - A Christmas Story • Fannie C. Macaulay
... the million mark. Not wishing to seem rude, the colonel moved slowly on down the street. When he turned his head, after going a rod or two, and looked back over his shoulder, the girl had risen and was re-entering the house. Her disappearance was promptly followed by the notes of a piano, slightly out of tune, to which some one—presumably the young woman—was singing in a high voice, which might have been better had it ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... and everywhere were swinging baskets of silver birch, brimming over with the delicate green of smilax or clouded in an amethystine mist of lobelias. I can still see the little sitting-room with its piano, its plenitude of cushions, its book-rack, its Indian corner, its tasteful paper, its pictures, and always and everywhere flowers, flowers. The air was heavy with the fragrance of them. They glorified the crudest corner, and made our home like ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... Box Street tenement, distributing smiles, pennies, impulsive, genuine caresses, to the children as he went, tipping their faces, patting their heads, all in the rare, unquestioned way, being not alien to the manner of the poor. A street piano, at the corner, tinkled an air to which a throng of ragged, lean little girls danced in the yellow sunshine, dodging trucks and idlers and impatient pedestrians with unconcern, colliding and tripping with utmost good nature. The curate ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... It was a dear little apartment that the girls shared, with a living-room chosen especially for having nice times in. It was lighted by tall candles, and had a gas grate that was almost human. There was a grand piano which took up more than its share of room, there was the davenport aforesaid, there were companionable chairs and taborets acquired by Lucille and kept by Marjorie in the exact places where they looked best; there were soft draperies, also hemmed and put up by Marjorie. ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... last century a pianoforte had not figured in any Royston household, but it came at the beginning of this century when Lady Wortham as she was always styled—as the daughter of Sir Thomas Hatton, Bart., and wife of Hale Wortham, Esq.—became the owner of the first piano at their house in Melbourn Street (now ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... but it is seldom that I have written anything with so much pleasure," she tells us. "It was in the country, in summer weather, as hot as the Italian climate I had lately left. I have never seen so many birds and flowers in my garden. Liszt was playing the piano on the ground floor, and the nightingales, intoxicated with music and sunshine, were singing ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... There was no one to control her, because her grandmother was confined to her own room. And so Aurore Dupin, now in superb health, rushed into every sort of diversion with all the zest of youth. She read voraciously—religion, poetry, philosophy. She was an excellent musician, playing the piano and the harp. Once, in a spirit of unconscious egotism, she wrote ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... them the next at their lodgings, the modesty of which was enhanced by a hundred pretty feminine devices—flowers and photographs and portable knick-knacks and a hired piano and morsels of old brocade flung over angular sofas. I took them to drive; I met them again at the Kursaal; I arranged that we should dine together, after the Homburg fashion, at the same table d'hote; and during several days this revived ...
— Louisa Pallant • Henry James
... before they carried things with too high a hand. Not having a half-penny at command, she was helpless. Without money and without friends, you may wonder how she supported herself while the correspondence was going on. She supported herself by playing the piano-forte at a low concert-room in Brussels. The men laid siege to her, of course, in all directions; but they found her insensible as adamant. One of these rejected gentlemen was a Russian; and he was the means of making ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... doctor; don't, please. I'm a warm man, and I'm getting warmer. My house is tip-top. I gave two-fifty for the piano, I did, 'pon my soul, and fifty apiece for the cut-glass chandies in the drawing-room. There ain't a better garden in Sydenham. You're willing, ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... close-shuttered, handsome, brutally insensible houses. If I were a poor man, with a sick child pining in some garret or cellar at the North End, I should break into one of them, and camp out on the grand piano." ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... trumpets, trombones and drums to produce a deafening uproar, but it took all the native force of a Wagner to fill, to inform, the thought itself with such energy that, looking at the score, the passages seem almost to leap out from the page, and, played on even a small piano, their effect is still overwhelming. When the opera was produced the effect on the audience was certainly overwhelming, almost stupefying. The Dutchman had been accepted at Berlin on Meyerbeer's recommendation, but that recommendation Wagner ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... Gilbert, was a delicate lad, in his fourteenth year, handsome, spirituelle and intellectual to a remarkable degree. He was a real genius, passionately fond of books, art and music; already an accomplished player on both the piano and violin. Yet withal, he was very reticent, sensitive and shy, on account of his small size and deformed body, the result of spinal trouble caused by ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... men, but the greatest hospitality, and all the peasants very submissive! Sanin tried to impart to her and her daughter some more exact information. When the conversation touched on Russian music, they begged him at once to sing some Russian air and showed him a diminutive piano with black keys instead of white and white instead of black. He obeyed without making much ado and accompanying himself with two fingers of the right hand and three of the left (the first, second, and little ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... a big chair beside the piano, and sat there alone, interested and curious. And presently Pittiwitz, stealing toward the hearth, arched her back under his hand, and he reached down and lifted her to his knee, where she stretched herself, sphinx-like, her amber eyes shining ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... half-light of the great salon clad in its summer garb, filled with flowers, the plush furniture swathed in white covers, the chandeliers draped in gauze, the shades lowered and the windows open, Madame Jenkins sits at the piano, picking out the last production of the fashionable musician of the day; a few sonorous chords accompany the exquisite lines, a melancholy Lied in unequal measures, which seems to have been written for the serious sweetness of her ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... mistake, or, perhaps, a purposed misdirection; but, nothing daunted by the difficulties encountered, she succeeded in gaining admittance to apartments on the second floor, where, instead of poverty and sickness, she found the mother in the midst of evident comfort, seated at her piano, who at first denied all knowledge of the little charity girl, and was only confronted successfully by the entrance unguardedly of ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... the chateau, then classified, registered, packed and "put into two carts, upon which they took care to place the Red Cross flag." We read in the note-book of a wounded German soldier, under medical treatment at Brussels, "A car has arrived at the hospital, bringing war booty, a piano, two sewing machines and all sorts of ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... and, when they had almost reached the house, they heard the sound of a piano, and a female voice singing the never-failing ...
— Frank on a Gun-Boat • Harry Castlemon
... precisely the same in plan and construction, only in the larger sizes the handles develop or evolve into shafts; and they are equally suitable, according to size, for the vending of whelks, for a hot-potato can, a piano organ, or for the conveyance of a cheery and numerous party to the Derby. Fothergill bought a medium sized "developed'' one, and also a donkey to fit; he had it painted white, picked out with green — the barrow, not the donkey — and ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... at her coming. He cared no more for music than does a cat, but eagerly followed her across the broad hall into the parlor when she suggested showing him the beautiful piano papa had given her; and old John, blessing her, lurched for the sofa, buried his hot head in a pillow, and was asleep in ten seconds. Major Burleigh was alone with the lovely daughter of the veteran trader. He was a man of the world; she an ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... her mistress: and she sat down, staring uneasily round about her, as if wondering what was going to befall her next. Very silent was the little parlor; so small, that it was almost filled up by its large square piano, its six cane-bottomed chairs, and one easy chair, in which sat Miss Leaf with the great Book ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... atmosphere of the Dean household, her reserve melted and before dinner was over she had forgotten all about herself and was laughing merrily with Marjorie over Mr. Dean's nonsense. After dinner Mrs. Dean played on the piano and Constance, who knew how to dance was initiated into the mysteries of several new steps which were favorites of the Franklin girls, and later the two girls spent a happy hour in Marjorie's room with her books, of which she ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... Gluck, a piano manufacturer of Munich, was a follower of Horace Fletcher, the American munching missionary. Unlike the Swiss, who craved raw food, Herr Gluck ate everything, but each mouthful only after thorough maceration, salivation, and slow deglutition. At breakfast he absorbed a glass of milk ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... your add in the Chicago Defender for laborers. I am a young man and want to finish school. I want you to look out for me a job on the place working morning and evening. I would like to get a job in some private family so I could continue taking my piano lesson I can do anything around the house but drive and can even learn that. Send me the name of the best High school in Chicago. How is the Wendell Phillips College. I have finish the grammer school. I cannot come before the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... at the piano in the drawing-room, and Toni was entertaining her lover with music, not voluntarily, however, but at her father's request, for she herself considered music a wearisome and superfluous accomplishment. But the head forester had insisted ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... that day were anything but a satisfaction to Fraeulein Bernhardt, the piano teacher. Her mind was so abstracted that she kept continually playing wrong fingering, or even an occasional wrong note in the harmonic minors. Her study was little better, and her piece a dead failure. The mistress, with characteristic ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... call that thing artistic, Mrs. Hewson, if you mean the thing that's over the piano in ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... wife for some neighbours. One of them was a professional furniture- remover, and, half-way up the narrow stairs, the unfortunate had to remind him that he was dealing with a British working man, and not a piano. Four pairs of hands deposited Mr. Scutts with mathematical precision in the centre of the bed and then proceeded to tuck him in, while Mrs. Scutts drew the sheet in a straight ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... Her big drooping eyes were wet with tears, and the little homesick note in her voice made an irresistible appeal to the hearts of those who heard it,—at least it did to mine, and I sneaked away behind the lid of the grand piano, which was open, to get out my pocket handkerchief, for I did not choose to make a spectacle of myself, and I don't know how to cry prettily, like Nora Costello. My nose gets red, and my eyes look as if I were addicted to the use ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... costume; and in a conspicuous place, evidently the pride of the whole collection, was a full-length portrait of the Queen, smiling benignantly down on her subjects. Below the cases of butterflies and birds was a piano—yes, actually, a piano—and by no means a bad one too. Then, near the fire-place, was a snug little book- case, well furnished with books; and over the mantelpiece, in the centre of a warm-looking paper, was the text, in large characters, "The love of Christ constraineth us." The mantelpiece ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... the letter from his sister telling of young Arthur's infatuation for the cheap actress, Miss Fotheringay, the story carries one along in the leisurely way of the last century. All the people are a delight, from Captain Costigan to Fowker, and from the French chef, who went to the piano for stimulus in his culinary work, to Blanche Amory and her amazing French affectations. But Pendennis is ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... compare these two conditions of the brain, to a piano at which some great musician sits, and who as he throws his fingers over the keys recalls some melody which he might harmonize if he use all his power. This comparison may be extended yet further, when we remember that reflection is to ideas, what harmony is to sounds; ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... playing the piano as an example of the kind of action we are in search of, we observe that a practised player will perform very difficult pieces apparently without effort, often, indeed, while thinking and talking of something quite other than his music; yet he will play accurately ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... a proposition in Euclid, should we really be satisfied with the statement that it represented the random pencil-strokes made by a blindfolded child ignorant of geometry? On the other hand, if a fretful baby is allowed to divert himself by hammering the piano keys, is the result ever remotely akin to a tune? We know perfectly well that we never get harmony, order, beauty, rationality by accident; and there is only one other alternative—design, purpose, guidance. Professor Fiske ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... basso of the Opera, accompanied at the piano by one of the unclassified ladies, was just finishing Mephistopheles' drinking song out of Faust when ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... were other local representatives—naval captains with staffs similar to those of the home ports—so that, to use a phrase of the Director of Transports, the ships were "well shepherded." It was, in fact, much the position of a man who with ten fingers manipulates {p.097} the several keys of a piano. If the end crowns the work it may be said, although the end is not quite yet, that the work of transportation has been crowned. No loss of human life by preventable cause has occurred, nor has complaint been heard of serious hitch of any kind. ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... completed in 1842, at Teplitz, during an excursion in the Bohemian mountains; but the whole score was not finished until three years later. Wagner had gone over it all so carefully that it was printed without much revision, and he had even written the piano score, which was sent to Berlin in 1845 and appeared in the same year that the opera was produced ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... When they found they were not to be oppressed they became servile and fawning. I had my officers' mess in the schoolmaster's house. He had been a non-commissioned officer of infantry, and yet he wanted to send his daughters in to play the piano for us after dinner. We would have despised the German less if he had been able to "hate" a little more after he was beaten and not so bitterly while he felt ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... a more important place among educational influences now that the old superstition of making every child play the piano is passing away. It was an injustice both to the right reason of a child and to the honour of music when it was forced upon those who were unwilling and unfit to attain any degree of excellence in it. We are renouncing these superstitions and turning to something more widely possible—to ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... suddenly in her German Russian, 'music greatly loves, and herself very beautifully plays the piano, only she likes not to play the piano when she ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... not only for her beauty, but for her accomplishments. She was one of the ladies who sang: a gentleman accompanied her on the piano. She and Mr. Rochester ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... in their glory, and as soon as the breakfast things were out of the way, they prepared for a grand cooking-time. They were handy girls, though they had never heard of a cooking-school, never touched a piano, and knew nothing of embroidery beyond the samplers which hung framed in the parlor; one ornamented with a pink mourner under a blue weeping-willow, the other with this pleasing verse, each word ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... one of their clashes, she devilled him at the piano, playing a mad damned thing that stirred and irritated him and set his pulse pounding wild and undisciplined fancies in the ordered chamber of his brain. The worst of it was she saw and knew just what she was doing. She was ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... indecent poverty. Better education; better housing; better chances for healthy recreation—these are the things for which the masses are clamouring. Why is it wrong for a workman who has made money during the war to buy a piano—and to hear people talk that seems to be one of their most dastardly crimes—when it is quite all right for his employer, who has made more money out of the war, to pay five pounds for one good dinner, or ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... there save for the war. At present he is chiefly conscious of his clothes. His mother embraces him with cries of rapture, while Mr. Torrance surveys him quizzically over the paper; and Emma, rushing to the piano, which is of such an old-fashioned kind that it can also be used as a sideboard, plays 'See the ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... and above their school learning they've been taught to swim, ride, dance, use tools, play on the piano, and speak fair to middling French. Yet, as you say, Fred, the most difficult part is to come, just as we fancied that we were through. And the terrible reflection is that we're not so sure now what we ought to do for them as we ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... chairs and tables. Everywhere were evidences of the haste with which the place had been vacated as well as the superstitious dread which had prevented it being re-entered for the commonplace purpose of cleaning. Even the piano had not been shut, and under it lay some scattered sheets of music which had been left where they fell, to the probable loss of some poor musician. The clock occupying the center of the mantelpiece alone gave evidence of ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... Bruennhilde, and, especially, of Siegmund, bear a close relationship to Beethoven's symphonies and sonatas. I can never play the recitative con espressione e semplice of the seventeenth sonata for the piano (Op. 31, No. 2) without being reminded of the forests of Die Walkuere and the fugitive hero. But in Siegfried I find, not only a likeness to Beethoven in details, but the same spirit running through the work—both ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... a house of my own, when I'm grown up," said pretty Del; "I shall have a red carpet and some curtains; my husband will buy me a piano." ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... expedition on leaving Cape Columbia comprised two wooden reels of a length equal to the width of the sledge, a detachable wooden crank to go on each end of the reel, to each reel a thousand fathoms (six thousand feet) of specially made steel piano wire of a diameter .028 inches, and one fourteen-pound lead having at its lower end a small bronze clam-shell device, self-tripping when it reached the bottom, for the purpose of bringing up samples of the ocean bed. The weights of this outfit were as follows: each thousand ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... Amsterdam, there was placed in the apartments of the Empress a piano so constructed as to appear like a desk with a division in the middle, and in this space was placed a small bust of the Emperor of Russia. Soon after, the Emperor wished to see if the apartments of the Empress ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... from the door and went on with his explorations. In the parlor there was light enough from the front door to show him the long formal room with its white marble centre-table adorned with a few gilt-topped books and a spindly lamp, the square piano, the stiff-looking chairs and rockers, the few pictures against the faded gold paper, the white mantel, set with shells and vases and a few photographs, the quaint curving-backed sofa between the side windows. He closed the door again and turned ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... the moonlight to get rid of the excitement of the evening, bent our steps in that direction. There were about as many persons assembled as the little drawing-room would hold, and Clara, having forgotten her headach, and looking as lovely as ever, was seated at a wretched piano, endeavouring to accompany herself in her favourite songs. Willingham and myself stood by, and our repeated requests for some of those melodies which, unknown to us before, we had learnt from her singing to admire beyond all the fashionable trash of the day, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... there was a quiver of excitement in his voice, like the tremor of a piano string long after it has been struck. "Dan, I been thinking about something and now I'm ready to tell ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... middle age,—then, as ever, "the poet of all circles, and the idol of his own." As his visits to his native city were few and far between, the power to see him, and especially to hear him, was a boon of magnitude. It was, indeed, a treat, when, seated at the piano, he gave voice to the glorious "Melodies" that are justly regarded as the most valuable of his legacies to mankind. I can recall that evening as vividly as if it were not a sennight old: the graceful man, small and slim in figure, his upturned ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... tears in her eyes, 'Boys, always take care of one another.' So each evening I have tried to tuck Bertie in his little bed, and Bertie, with equal enthusiasm, has attempted to tuck me in. It has been hard on pyjamas, bed springs, and the temper of the Lady with the Piano who resides in the apartments immediately beneath; so, at the wise suggestion of our friends in the windows"—he waved a graceful hand toward them, and they gravely bowed acknowledgment—"we are now engaged in deciding the matter Graeco-Roman. The winner ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... Earliest Youth, bent all his Energies toward Learning to play the Piano. He studied at Home and Abroad with Greatest Masters, and he Achieved Wonderful Success. But as he was about to Begin his Triumphant and Profitable Career, he had the Misfortune to lose both ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... write such a letter as would be a comfort to her mother, so she gave that up, and made her sole assertion of liberty the working out of a tough double equation in Colenso, which actually came right, and put her in such good humour that she was no longer afraid of drumming the poor piano to death and Aunt Ada upstairs to distraction, but ventured on learning one of the Lieder ohne Worte; and when her Aunt Ada came down and complimented her on the sounds that had ascended, she was complacent enough to write a very cheerful letter, whilst her aunt was busied with her ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... making such a noise about me I cannot write any more. Mary is playing on the piano; Martha is chattering as fast as her little tongue can run; and Branwell is standing before her, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... flowers and arranged the sheets of music scattered in disorder over the piano, she looked at the samovar, and remarked, ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... the energetic sense of loathing for the negro proved it. The music, loud and strident—an ordinary Italian piano-organ having been introduced amongst the Oriental instruments—banged on, and then abruptly came to a stop when the negro cracked his whip. The two African women resumed their chairs, there was some applause, and a good many small coins fell on the stage from the hands ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... the little folks are tired of hearing about pets, but I want to tell them how my kitty jumped on the piano, and ran over the keys from one end of them to the other, and the tune she played frightened her so that she scampered away with all her might. She is now curled up in my hat, fast asleep. I have two carrier-doves for ...
— Harper's Young People, September 28, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... going to write until my sister begins playing the piano. Music and literature don't mix—believe me. There are two cruises in this book—a big one and a little one. You can take your pick. The little one is full of mud and the big one is full of pep. Anyway you get your money's ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... which had been transformed into an impromptu ball-room by taking up the rugs and moving the piano to one end of it, ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... instruments, too, is the cause of modifications in the music written for them. The limited compass of the pianoforte, for example, was certainly the sole reason why Beethoven failed to continue in octaves the entire ascending scale in one of his sonatas. Had the piano in his day possessed its present compass, he would undoubtedly have written the passage throughout in octaves, i.e., as modern pianists play it. If a rigid adherence to the printed letter of ancient music is to be strictly observed, without ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... of Pleasure (ltd.). Not the girls in whose hearts Berlin is beating, not the girls in whose elan Berlin lives and laughs. Leave behind all places such as these, seeker after the soul of Berlin. Leave behind the Tingel-Tangel with its uniformed bouncer at the gate, with its threadbare piano, with its "na kleener Dicker" smirked by soiled decolletes, its doleful near-naughty ditties—"Ich lass mich nicht verfuehren, dazu bin ich zu schlau, ich kenne die Manieren der Maenner ganz genau"—"I won't be led astray, I am ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... necessitated it being kept in the drawing-room, as otherwise she forgot all about it; and Vane had a vivid recollection of a large and incredibly stout bird with a watery and furtive eye ensconced on cushions near the piano. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... staff arranged for supper at the house of Colonel Bacon, an old man and Secessionist. The Colonel treated us politely, but while we were eating a number of ladies of the town assembled in an adjoining parlor in which there was a piano, threw the communicating door open, and proceeded to sing such Confederate war-songs as Stonewall Jackson's Away and My Maryland. We of course accepted good humoredly this concert for our benefit, but when we had finished supper, ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... defiance of the Inferno outside, festal preparations were being made in a little house on Campden Hill. Lamps were lit; in the drawing-room chairs were pushed back; the piano was open, and a violin stand towered beside it; chrysanthemums were everywhere; an invalid lady in a 'best cap' occupied the sofa; and two girls were flitting about, clearly making the last arrangements necessary for ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... besides the armchair, two other chairs, a piano, a three-legged table, and a cosy corner. Of the walls, one was occupied by the window, the other by a draped mantelshelf bristling with Cupids. Opposite the window was the door, and beside the door a ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... her aware of Peters standing beside her. He looked down silently on the card table for a few moments, pointed with a nicotine-stained finger to a move Miss Craven had missed and then wandered across the room and sat down at the piano. For a while his hands moved silently over the keys, then he began to play, and his playing was exquisite. Gillian sat and marvelled. Peters and music had seemed widely apart. He had appeared so essentially a sportsman; in spite of the literary tendency that his sympathetic ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... garter snake in the park the other day and he brought it home and hid it in the piano. When his sister's young man opened the instrument that evening to play "For Goodness Sake" he thought he had 'em and yelled like a Piute on the war-hath. They won't believe in Johnny's innocence somehow, and his father ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... speak. He swayed back a half step with a flicker of change crossing his face then stood steady and smiling again. That brief grimace touched Bryce's nerves with a sensation that was like the jangle of something heavy dropped inside a piano, a sound he had heard once. But the numbness did not lift from his feelings. He was still smiling. The third bullet would be between ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... being occupied by a sort of sideboard on each side of the entrance door, while against the after bulkhead stood a very handsome pianoforte, open, with a quantity of music in a stand beside it. There was a door to the right of the piano, which, I conjectured, led to the captain's state-room, right abaft; and the side bulkheads, which like the rest of the woodwork of the cabin were painted in white enamel, were each pierced by two doors, close together, which, I had no doubt, gave access to state-rooms. My surmise ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... note. "Will you take it?" My heart beat—my agonies of want pressed, but it was too little. I trembled out, "I cannot." The gentleman invited me to dine, and when we were sitting over our wine, agreed to give me my price. His lady said, "But, my dear, where am I to put my piano?" and the bargain was at an end!' On the third day Sir George Beaumont and Mr. Holwell Carr came to the Exhibition, having been deputed to buy the picture for the British Gallery. While they were discussing its merits, one of the officials went over, and put 'sold' on the frame, whereupon the ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... stretching away northward for ten or fifteen miles, with Mount Orford and his supporting hills in the near background; while I had only to walk the length of the piazza to look round the corner of the house at Owl's Head itself, at whose base we were. The hotel had less than a dozen guests and no piano, and there was neither carriage-road nor railway within sight or hearing. Yes, this was the place where I would spend the eight days which yet remained to ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... Still young, though already bald, always carefully shaved, a little corpulent, as it was fitting, wearing a gold pince-nez instead of old-fashioned spectacles, active, gallant, and joyous, he passed in Vernon for an artist. He thrummed on the piano and played on the violin, and gave musical evenings where interpretations were given of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... and also from the West Indies. The former is classed as "Honduras"; the latter is generally known as San Domingo mahogany and commands the highest price. Rosewood is obtained from Brazil, and is used almost exclusively in piano-cases. Both are cut into thin veneers, to be glued to a less ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
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