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Spindle   Listen
verb
Spindle  v. i.  (past & past part. spindled; pres. part. spindling)  To shoot or grow into a long, slender stalk or body; to become disproportionately tall and slender. "It has begun to spindle into overintellectuality."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Spindle" Quotes from Famous Books



... influence from his lucent seat. I meant she should be courteous, facile, sweet, Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride: I meant each softest virtue there should meet, Fit in that softer bosom to reside. Only a learned and a manly soul I purposed her, that should, with even powers, The rock, the spindle, and the shears, control, Of Destiny, and spin her own free hours. Such when I meant to feign, and wished to see, My Muse bade, BEDFORD write, and ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... is gotten from the leaves partly by maceration, partly by beating, is spun in a primitive fashion. Almost every woman one meets upon the road, no matter what burden of babies or goods she carries, has a hank of the fibre thrown over her shoulder, and keeps her little spindle whirling, spinning the strong thread as she walks. Her spindle consists of a slender stick thrust through a whorl of baked pottery. Such whorls are no longer made, but the ancient ones, called by the Aztec name malacates, are picked up in the fields and reapplied to their ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr

... dame Who plies with' rock and spindle The patient flax, how great a flame Yon little spark shall kindle! The lurid morning shall reveal A fire no king can smother Where British flint and Boston steel Have clashed against each other! Old charters shrivel in its track, His Worship's ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... "With a spindle-shanked husband capering in a Court suit before he goes to bed every night, that he may n't forget what a fine fellow he was one day bygone! You're growing lean on it, Mart, like a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... for that!" said the woman; "and many thanks, too! What do I want with a sheep? I have neither wheel nor spindle, and I do not care either to toil and drudge making clothes; we can buy clothes now as before. Now I can have goose-fat, which I have so long been wishing for, and some feathers to stuff that little pillow of mine. Run, children, and let in ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various

... this Catalogue are designed to show the manner in which the Zui and Moki Indians use certain implements in some of their arts and industries, such as the polishing stone; rotary, stone-pointed drill; the manner of combing and dressing the hair; the spindle whorl, showing the mode of preparing the woof ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona in 1881 • James Stevenson

... jug, an Apostel-Krug, of Kruessen, was solemnly dancing a minuet with a plump Faenza jar; a tall Dutch clock was going through a gavotte with a spindle-legged ancient chair; a very droll porcelain figure of Littenhausen was bowing to a very stiff soldier in terre cuite of Ulm; an old violin of Cremona was playing itself, and a queer little shrill plaintive music that thought itself merry came from a painted spinet covered with faded ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)

... that appears to us to need control. We are unable to share the optimism which animates Remenham and his friends as to the direction and effects of the new forces of industry. Above the whirr of the spindle and the shaft we hear the cry of the poor. Behind our flourishing warehouses and shops we see the hovels of the artisan. We watch along our highroads the long procession of labourers deserting their ancestral villages for the cities; we trace them to the slum and the ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson

... the native plant by means of a very primitive spindle, which consists of a small rod of wood at the end of which is a top-shaped piece of the same material which serves to sustain the necessary rotation. A tuft of cotton is attached to the end of this ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... the antiquated finery of the Iron Duke, with which the old soldier sought to please his young mistress. It provoked a smile or two from the more frivolous as the grey, gaunt, spindle-shanked old man stalked by, yet it was not without its pathetic side. The Duke wore a scarlet coat, a tight fit, laced with gold, with splendid gold buttons and frogs, the brilliant star of the Order of the Garter, and the Order of the Golden Fleece, a waistcoat of scarlet ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler

... evident disarray it, however, exhibited fewer signs of the strange, long-past agitation. In dimensions it was similar to the dining-room, running from front to back of the house. Here, too, was another elaborate candelabrum, somewhat smaller than the first, queer, spindle-legged, fiddle-backed chairs, beautiful cabinets and tables, and an old, square piano, still open. The chairs stood in irregular groups of twos and threes, chumming cozily together as their occupants had doubtless done, and over the piano had been carelessly thrown a long, ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman

... plated basket-hilt; beside it hung a dirk—longer than usual, and fine in form, with a carved hilt in the shape of an eagle's head and neck, and its sheath, whose leather was dry and flaky with age, heavily mounted in silver. Below these was a card-table of marquetry with spindle-legs, and on it a work-box of ivory, inlaid with silver and ebony. In the corner stood a harp, an Erard, golden and gracious, not a string of it broken. In the middle of the room was a small square table, covered with a green cloth. An old-fashioned easy chair stood by the chimney; and one ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... no such things as twigs that would bend to make wicker-ware - at least, none yet found out; and as to a wheelbarrow, I fancied I could make all but the wheel; but that I had no notion of; neither did I know how to go about it; besides, I had no possible way to make the iron gudgeons for the spindle or axis of the wheel to run in; so I gave it over, and so, for carrying away the earth which I dug out of the cave, I made me a thing like a hod which the labourers carry mortar in when they serve the bricklayers. This was not so difficult to me as the making the ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe

... invention of the machinery named below, all carding, spinning, and weaving of wool and cotton had been done by the use of the hand-cards, one-spindle wheels, and common hand-looms. The work, for a long period, was performed in families; but the improved machinery propelled by steam power, has so reduced the cost of cotton manufactures, that all household manufacturing has long since ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... served Omphale)—Ver. 1026. He alludes to the story of Omphale, Queen of Lydia, and Hercules. Being violently in love with her, the hero laid aside his club and boar's skin, and in the habit of a woman plied the spindle and distaff with her maids. See a curious story of Omphale, Hercules, and Faunus, in the Fasti of Ovid, B. ii. l. 305. As to the reappearance of Thraso here, Colman has the following remarks: "Thraso, says Donatus, is brought back again in order to be admitted to some share in the good ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence

... plumbing, and a manicure girl from Seattle; yes, sir, just like in the great wicked cities. It had already turned some of our very best homes into domestic hells, and no wonder! Decent, God-fearing men, who'd led regular lives and had whiskers and grown children, setting down to a little spindle-legged table with this creature, dipping their clumsy old hands into a pink saucedish of suds and then going brazenly back to their innocent families with their nails glittering like piano keys. Oh, that young dame ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... third, she is tall and slender, a fragile spindle, a slim, sylph-like creature, suggesting a taper with the lower portion patterned, embossed, brocaded in the wax itself; she stands magnificently arrayed in a stiff-pleated robe channelled lengthwise, like a stick of celery. The bodice is richly trimmed and stitched; below her waist hangs a ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... plate, much as the modern sideboard is used. The number of shelves was limited by rank; the wife of a baronet could have two, a countess three, a princess four, a queen five. They were beautifully carved, very often, the doors to the enclosed portions having heads, Tudor roses, arches, spindle ornaments and many other designs common to the Tudor and Jacobean periods. They had a silk "carpet" put on the shelves with the fringe hanging over the ends, but not the front, and on this was ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop

... small part, and was fit to take none. There were not wanting writers and thinkers who saw clearly the end to which the enervation of the female was tending, and who were not sparing in their denunciations. "Time was," cries one Roman writer of that age, "when the matron turned the spindle with the hand and kept at the same time the pot in her eye that the pottage might not be singed, but now," he adds bitterly, "when the wife, loaded with jewels, reposes among pillows, or seeks the dissipation of ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner

... whom my eyes suddenly rested, for the first time, upwards of twenty years ago, in the study of S. T. Coleridge—looking, as I said before, light as a Mercury to eyes familiar with the British build; but, with reference to the lengthy model of you Yankees, who spindle up so tall and narrow, already rather bulky and columnar. Note, however, that of all this array of personal features, as I have here described them, I then saw nothing at all, my attention being altogether occupied with Mr. Wilson's ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... weaving, in and out, in and out, she was a twentieth century version of any one of the Fates, with the Klinger darner and mender substituted for distaff and spindle. There was something almost humanly intelligent in the workings of Martha's machine. Under its glittering needle she would shove a sock whose heel bore a great, jagged, gaping wound. Your home darner, equipped only with mending egg, needle, and cotton, would have pronounced ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... tells us of Margaret's favourite occupations, mentioning that when she was alone in her room she more often held a book in her hand than a distaff, a pen than a spindle, and the ivory of her tablets than a needle. He then adds: "And if she applied herself to tapestry or other needlework, such as was to her a pleasant occupation, she had beside her some one who read to her, either from a historian ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre

... vary considerably in size, shape, and quality. Some are short and blunt at the tips, others are long and cylindrical, either crooked or straight, while others are medium in size and spindle-shaped. Some varieties, which are known as yams, cook moist and sugary, while others, which are simply called sweet potatoes, cook dry and mealy. The kind to select depends entirely on the individual taste, for in composition and food value all the varieties are similar. In composition, sweet ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 2 - Volume 2: Milk, Butter and Cheese; Eggs; Vegetables • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences

... these, an additional washing-sink is provided. Over this sink, connected with the electric wires, we have rigged three hanging spindles, of as many different sizes. These spindles can be raised or lowered by the operator, while they are in motion. Each spindle is armed on every side with loose wings of alternating wire scrapers and dish-cloths. The vessel to be cleansed is placed on the movable carrier at the bottom of the sink. Passing under a spindle of the proper size, the spindle ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... hand!). Would Jane Tillman marry him? No woman in the three villages would be more obnoxious to his daughters; that in itself was a distinct gain. She was a fine, robust figure of a woman in her early forties, and he thought, after all, that the hollow-chested, spindle-shanked kind were more ex-pensive to feed, on the whole, than their better-padded sisters. He had never had any difficulty in managing wives, and thought himself quite equal to one more bout, even at sixty-five, though he had just the faintest ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin

... her task with busy sleight, Come, show thy tricks and sportive graces, Thus circled round with merry faces: Backward coiled and crouching low, With glaring eyeballs watch thy foe, The housewife's spindle whirling round, Or thread or straw that on the ground Its shadow throws, by urchin sly Held out to lure thy roving eye; Then stealing onward, fiercely spring Upon the tempting, faithless thing. Now, wheeling round with bootless skill, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... a regular spindle-shanks. And just look at that fool Akoulina. Wasn't the girl a regular untidy slattern, and just look at her now! Where has it all come from? Yes, he has fitted her out. She's grown so smart, so puffed up, just like a bubble that's ready to burst. ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al

... the door would be found the usual crowd of Kirghiz post-drivers. After the presentation of documents to the starosta, who would hesitate at first about quartering our horses in the travelers' room, we would proceed at once to place our dust-covered heads beneath the spindle of the washing-tank. Although by this dripping-pan arrangement we would usually succeed in getting as much water down our backs as on our faces, yet we were consoled by the thought that too much was better than not enough, as ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... talk on me. I know you and your kind up one side and down the other. You say you've put three years in 'stir' and that settles it." At this point he broke off short, righted his chair with a snap and reached for a bill-spindle on his desk. After a glance at one of the impaled memoranda he sat back again, chewing his cigar and staring into vacancy. A full minute elapsed before he deigned to become once more aware of my presence. Then he whirled upon me to rap ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde

... in Italy, were bound to the cart by cords, which were fast in front, but which wound upon a heavy spindle at the back. The spindle had three holes in it, in which staves were thrust as levers, to turn it and hold the ropes taut. Two of the staves were tightly pressed against the load, while the third stood ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford

... Her arms, thin, spindle shaped, like those of very young girls, were encircled with a kind of metal ornament, and bracelets of glass beads; her hair was twisted into little cords; on her breast hung a green paste idol, identified by her whip of seven lashes as Isis, ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough

... to be so bitter that it is not eaten by birds (Loudon, "Arboretum," ii., 497, 1.); and, secondly, because it is a pretty coincidence that this most familiar of household birds should feed fondly from the tree which gives the housewife her spindle,—the proper name of the dogwood in English, French, and German being alike "Spindle-tree." It feeds, however, with us, certainly, most on worms and insects. I am not sure how far the following account of its mode of dressing its dinners may be depended on: I take it from ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin

... squeek, squeak, squeal, squall, brawl, wraul, yaul, spaul, screek, shriek, shrill, sharp, shrivel, wrinkle, crack, crash, clash, gnash, plash, crush, hush, hisse, fisse, whist, soft, jar, hurl, curl, whirl, buz, bustle, spindle, dwindle, twine, twist, and in many more, we may observe the agreement of such sort of sounds with the things signified; and this so frequently happens, that scarce any language which I know can be compared with ours. So that one monosyllable word, of which kind are almost ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson

... upon a broken corner-stone in the angle of a paved apartment, part of which she had swept clean to afford a smooth space for the evolutions of her spindle. A strong sunbeam, through a lofty and narrow window, fell upon her wild dress and features, and afforded her light for her occupation; the rest of the apartment was very gloomy. Equipt in a habit which mingled the national dress of the Scottish common ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... after the type of embryonal tissue, and consists of several varieties, such as the round cell, spindle cell, giant cell, alveolar, and melanosarcoma. They grow by preference in connective tissue and are quite vascular. Sarcomas appear either as single or multiple nodules, varying in size from a hempseed to a hazelnut, or else as a moderate number of tumors of the size of hen ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... soon forms an attractive mass of twisting and twining growths, with distinct glossy foliage in summer and brilliant scarlet fruit in autumn. The flowers are inconspicuous, the chief beauty of the shrub being the show of fruit, which resembles somewhat those of the Spindle Tree (Euonymus), and to which it is nearly allied. A native of North America, it grows from 12 feet to 15 feet high, and is useful in this country for covering arches or tree stems, or for allowing to run about at will on a mound ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster

... and autumn this is a very common species in large tufts on old stumps. In similar localities, and also in tufts, but neither so large, nor so common, Agaricus fusipes is found. It is preferable to the foregoing as an esculent, and is easily recognized by the spindle-shaped stem. ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... in 1819: this was the velocipede, or as it was then called "the hobby," the grandfather of the bicycle and tricycle of our day. A tall gawky perched on the summit of a lofty bicycle, with an enormous wheel gyrating between a couple of spindle shanks capped with enormous crab-shells, is a sufficiently familiar and ridiculous object in our times; but the appearance presented by the people of 1819, who adopted the spider looking thing called a "hobby," was so intensely comical that it gave rise to ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... long since disappeared—the prowling soldier-robber from the camp had paid it many a visit, and its household gods lay broken upon the hearth. The tortilla stone and comal, red earthen ollas, calabash cups, bedsteads and benches of the cana vaquera, a whirligig spindle, an old stringless jarana or bandolon, with other like effects, lay in fragments upon the floor. Mingling with these were cheap coloured wood-prints, of saints and Saviour, that had been dragged from the walls, and with the ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... grand liturgy is recited, the "heaven-startling" Kami, having girdled herself with moss, crowned her head with a wreath of spindle-tree leaves and gathered a bouquet of bamboo grass, mounts upon a hollow wooden vessel and dances, stamping so that the wood resounds and reciting the ten numerals repeatedly. Then the "eight-hundred myriad" Kami laugh in unison, so that the "plain of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... this, though not much used now, is still occasionally employed, except in large factories. This combing is repeated two or three times, till it is sufficiently smooth and even for spinning. Spinning or converting wool, or cotton, silk, &c. into thread, was anciently performed by the distaff and spindle: these we find mentioned in sacred history, and they have been used in all ages, and in all countries yet discovered. The natives of India, and of some other parts of the world, still ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers

... precision. Distant ships were moving, like still pictures, on the horizon, as if that spell were laid on them which hushed the enchanted palace. There was just sea enough to roll the bell-buoy gently, and now and then was rung an idle note of warning. Three fishing-boats lay anchored off the Spindle, rising and falling, and every now and then a sea broke on the rock. On the white sand beach, waves were rolling in, dying softly away along the shore, or heavily breaking, with a long, ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin

... series of the Life of the Virgin there is a 'Repose in Egypt,' which has a naive homeliness in its grace and serenity. The woodcut represents a courtyard with a dwelling built in the ruins of an ancient palace. The Virgin sits spinning with a distaff and spindle beside the Holy Child's cradle, by which beautiful angels worship. Joseph is busy at his carpenter's work, and a number of little angels, in merry sport, assist him with ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler

... support. And yet, as if all this wretched deformity were not enough, one leg was shorter than the other, and the foot was a club one. To assist him in walking, he carried a pair of crutches, apparently much too long for him, which raised his spindle arms in their loose sockets, and rendered the hump more horrible. When he moved, his crutches spread out on either side of him, as he swung along between them, taking up a vast deal of room without any apparent necessity. His coat had apparently been the property of some great man of the previous ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa

... they visited all the antiquity shops in Fourth Avenue, and then threw themselves frankly upon reproductions, which they bought in the native wood and ordered painted, the settles and the spindle-backed chairs in the cool gray which she decided was the thing. In the same spirit they bought new brass fire-irons and new shovel and tongs, but all very tall and antique-looking, and then they got those little immoral mirrors, which Margaret ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... withstood By feeble human flesh and blood. 350 'Twas he that brought upon his knees The hect'ring, kill-cow HERCULES; Transform'd his leager-lion's skin T' a petticoat, and made him spin; Seiz'd on his club, and made it dwindle 355 T' a feeble distaff, and a spindle. 'Twas he that made emperors gallants To their own sisters and their aunts; Set popes and cardinals agog, To play with pages at leap-frog. 360 'Twas he that gave our Senate purges, And flux'd the House of many a burgess; Made those that represent the nation Submit, and suffer amputation; And ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... ancient 'castles,' each consisting of a single fosse and rampart, and other monuments. Several stone circles, 'over forty feet in diameter,' have been wickedly removed from the Valley of Rocks 'for the purpose of selling them as gate-posts!...' Spindle-wheels, or pixie grinding-stones, as the natives call them, have been found in the neighbourhood, as well as arrow-heads and 'a skinning knife with a ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote

... contrivance, spindle-carriages; bearing hundreds of spindles, run themselves out and in by means of automatic machinery, at the proper speed, without a hand touching them; the only labour required being that of a few boys and girls ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... pendant, consisting of a flat pear-shaped piece of shale, 2.5 inches long, and 2 inches broad, and perforated at the narrow end, was found along with querns, stones with concentric circles, and cup- shaped indentations worked in them; stone balls, spindle whorls, and an iron axe-head, in excavating an underground chamber at the Tappock, Torwood, Stirlingshire. One face of this pendant was covered with scratches in a vandyked pattern. Though of smaller size this seems to bear some analogy ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang

... and bordered with painted arabesques. Two or three small rugs relieved the bareness of the floor. An oval table on very thin legs stood in the middle; the chairs and couch seemed to have been made to match it, and had an eminently bare and uncomfortable appearance; a vase of flowers stood on a spindle-legged little table in front of one of the windows which opened down to the ground. Some colored prints in frames of stained wood hung on the walls, and some skimpy curtains draped ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty

... dawn-nymph Eurykleia; Sigurd is slain by a thorn, and Balder by a sharp sprig of mistletoe; and in the myth of the Sleeping Beauty, the earth-goddess sinks into her long winter sleep when pricked by the point of the spindle. In her cosmic palace, all is locked in icy repose, naught thriving save the ivy which defies the cold, until the kiss of the golden-haired sun-god reawakens life ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske

... valley. On every side were harvests, blossoming fields, vines loaded with grapes, and olive-trees full of fruit. In the thick shade of a fig-tree, by a running spring, sat a blind woman unrolling the last gold and silver thread from a spindle. Around her lay several distaffs, full of different kinds of materials ready for spinning—flax, hemp, ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various

... a saucy lout," said the sutor; "I'll brak' thy spindle-shanks wi' my pipe-stump. Be civil if thou can, Nicky, to thy betters. Sir, if it please ye to listen, we'll have ye well instructed in the matter by the schoolmaster here." He cast a roguish look at the pedagogue as he spoke. But I pray you draw in with ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby

... milking the late-found cow. She has a ludicrous look. An old rag of linsey-woolsey hugs her spindle form; her teeth are shovels, and cleave down her nether lip; her eyes catch every point of the compass across each other's glance; her forehead is low, her hair, a smoky white, and her voice, now flat, now treble, ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee

... the development of their great resources, when they have doubled or trebled their production of cotton, when they are producing the greater part of their food, when they are developing their manufactures of iron and steel, and introducing the spindle and loom into the cities and villages, it seems to me that men of the south surely will appreciate, if they do not approve, what I said in the ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... the spiralifer, which is common enough in towns, and which is, doubtless, known to almost every one. It consists of four flat fans attached to a spindle somewhat after the manner of the arms of a windmill. It is placed in a hollow tube and made to spin violently by pulling a string wound round the spindle. The result is that the spiralifer leaps out of the hollow tube and ascends powerfully as long as the violent ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne

... yellow, and sleeves to match. The men wear several very short coats, one over the other, the shortest trimmed with fringe; sometimes sentences are embroidered with coloured woollens round the edge. It was market day; the women were sitting, with distaff and spindle, on each side of the entrance to the Halle. Some of them have short bead-chains with a ring, attached to the left shoulder, to stick their distaffs in when not at work. There was abundance of fruit and vegetables, potatoes, and sardines, which, ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser

... and went into the inner room that showed through the wide square opening. The small brown oak-panelled room. No furniture but Richard's writing table and his chair. A tall narrow French window looking to the backs of houses, and opening on a leaded balcony. Spindle-wood trees, green balls held up on ramrod stems in ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair

... not Wagner's first love, nor even his first wife. For in November, 1836, he had married Wilhelmina Planer, the leading actress of the theatre in Magdeburg where he was musical director of opera. Her father was a spindle-maker. It is said that her desire to earn money for the household, rather than the impetus of a well-defined histrionic gift, led her to go on the stage; but, once on the stage, she discovered that she had unquestionable talent, and played leading ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb

... of thine, Wayland," he said, "has a fair neck to have been born in a smithy, and a pretty taper hand to have been used for twirling a spindle—faith, I'll believe in your relationship when the crow's egg ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott

... and these number not less than two thousand. They are the children of weavers who came from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany. They have been brought up from childhood to fill the bobbin or attend the spindle or the loom, and are therefore skilled hands, young as many of them are. I have known more than one affecting instance of aged parents having been comfortably maintained by daughters belonging ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... three bright little craters in a line, the middle one being much the largest. From the most easterly of these objects a light streak may be traced under a high sun, extending for many miles to another small crater on the N.W. of Diophantus, and expanding at a point due N. of the formation into a spindle-shaped marking. At sunrise, the W. portion of the streak has all the appearance of a cleft, with a branch about midway running to the S. side of Delisle. Under the same phase a broad band of shadow extends from the N.E. wall to the triangular mountain just mentioned, representing ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger

... bark. The South Sea Islanders made short gowns of plaited rushes, and the New Zealanders wore rude garments from strings made of native flax. These early products were made by the process of working the fibres by hand into a string or thread. The use of a simple spindle, composed of a stone like a large button, with a stick run through a hole in the centre, facilitated the making of thread and the construction of rude looms. It was but a step from these to the spinning-wheels and looms of the Middle ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... who seemed to enjoy with infinite zest the pastime of shooting-practice with little bows and arrows. No wonder that these Indians become expert bowmen. There were urchins there, scarce two feet high, with round bullets of bodies and short spindle-shanks, who could knock blackbirds off the trees at every shot, and cut the heads off the taller flowers with perfect certainty! There was much need, too, for the utmost proficiency they could attain, for the very existence of the Indian tribes of the prairies depends ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... put forth from the house and garth, and forbidden to go back thither till dusk. While the days were long and the grass was growing, I had to lead our goats to pasture in the wood-lawns, and must take with me rock and spindle, and spin so much of flax or hair as the woman gave me, or be beaten. But when the winter came and the snow was on the ground, then that watching and snaring of ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris

... Mall, is none here but we two? When didst thou see the starveling schoolmaster? That rat, that shrimp, that spindle-shank, That wren, that sheep-biter, that lean chitty-face, That famine, that lean envy, that all-bones, That bare anatomy, that Jack-a-Lent, That ghost, that shadow, that moon ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... the long stone seat beneath the eaves Of his old cottage, as it chanced that day, Employ'd in winter's work. Upon the stone His Wife sate near him, teasing matted wool, While, from the twin cards tooth'd with glittering wire, He fed the spindle of his youngest child, Who turn'd her large round wheel in the open air With back and forward steps. Towards the field In which the parish chapel stood alone, Girt round with a bare ring of mossy wall, While half an hour went by, the Priest had sent Many a long look of wonder, ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth

... when he was returning from the dealer with a fresh supply of cotton, he came home before his wife expected him. Supper was not ready, and in her haste to rise to prepare it, she overturned the wheel when it was still in motion. Hargreaves, entering at that moment, noticed that the spindle, usually horizontal, was now revolving in an upright position. This gave him the idea, and a short time afterwards he invented a machine with which one person could spin several threads at once (at first eight). From it has been developed ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education

... thought about himself had a large share in his immunity from weariness. He continued slight and thin—which was natural, for he was growing fast; but the muscles of his little bird-like legs seemed of steel. The spindle-shanks went striding, striding without a check, along the roughest roads, the pale face shining atop of them like a sweet calm moon. To Mr. Person's eyes, the moon, stooping, as she sometimes seems to do, downward from the sky, always looked like him. The child woke something new in ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald

... of men cleaning, spinning, and weaving. It is first carefully separated from the seed by the fingers, or by an iron roller, on a little block of wood, and rove out into long soft bands without twist. Then it receives its first twist on the spindle, and becomes about the thickness of coarse candlewick; after being taken off and wound into a large ball, it is given the final hard twist, and spun into a firm cop on the spindle again: all ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone

... present various modifications in the arrangement of their fibres, as relates to their tendinous structure. Sometimes they are completely longitudinal, and terminate, at each extremity, in a tendon, the entire muscle being spindle-shaped. In other situations, they are disposed like the rays of a fan, converging to a tendinous point, and constituting a ra'di-ate muscle. Again they are pen'ni-form, converging, like the plumes of a pen, to one side ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter

... beckets, and was half-way up the weather main rigging, while the watch was sheeting home and hoisting away the topgallant-sails and royals. When Keene reappeared on deck, after calling the skipper, I was comfortably astride the royal-yard, with my left arm round the spindle of the vane—the yard hoisting close up under the truck. With my right hand I manipulated the slide of the telescope and adjusted the focus of the instrument to suit ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood

... house, we saw the whole garrison assembled before the door. It consisted of a dozen dwarfish, spindle-shanked Mexican soldiers, none of them so big or half so strong as American boys of fifteen, and whom I would have backed a single Kentucky woodsman, armed with a riding-whip, to have driven to the four winds of heaven. These heroes all sported tremendous beards, whiskers, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... seen many examples of this quaint rustic furniture. Curious beds, consisting of shelves for parents and children, form a cupboard in the wall and are shut in during the day by a pair of lattice doors of Moorish design, with the wheel pattern and spindle perforations. These, with the armoire of similar design, and the "huche" or chest with relief carving, of a design part Moorish, part Byzantine, used as a step to mount to the bed and also as a table, are still the garniture of a good ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield

... back in the clean-swept kitchen, A part of her girlhood's little world; Her mother is there by the window, stitching; Spindle buzzes, and reel is whirled With many a click: on her little stool She sits, a child, by the open door, Watching, and dabbling her feet in the pool Of sunshine spilled on ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... caution as if he were walking on cracked ice, to a dark recess, used for depositing wood, and instructed him to ensconce himself behind the fagots. She herself lighted her lamp once more at the kitchen fire, and took her distaff and spindle, that she might not seem to be unemployed, in case any one came into ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... is propagated by seeds, which may be sown either broadcast or in drills; but the latter method is preferable, as allowing the roots to be drawn regularly, with less waste. For the spindle-rooted kinds, mark out the drills half an inch deep, and five or six inches apart; for the small, turnip-rooted kinds, three-quarters of an inch deep, and six inches asunder. As the plants advance in growth, thin them so as to leave the spindle-rooted ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr

... be an old woman with a wrinkled face, a furred brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaky voice, a scolding tongue, having a ragged coat on her back, a skull cap on her head, a spindle in her hand, a dog or cat by her side. There are three classes or divisions of devils—black, grey, and white. The first are omnipotent for evil, but powerless for good. The white have power to help, ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... two successive days, but on the second occasion Prince Ivan was a witness of what took place, and he seized her feather-dress and burnt it, and then laid hold of her. She first turned into a frog, then assumed various reptile forms, and finally became a spindle. This he broke in two, and flung one half in front and the other behind him, and the spell was broken along with it. So he regained his wife and went home with her. But as for the false wife, he took a ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston

... crowd of people a woman rushed, and falling on the ground, she seized the master's knees. She still held a spindle in her hand. She was covered with rags; her face was thin and her eyes deeply sunken, for during fourteen years they ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko

... saw a place where a flat roller would remedy the whole misfortune; but a flat roller at Cape Spartivento, hard, easily unshipped, running freely! There was a grooved pulley used for the paying-out machinery with a spindle wheel, which might suit me. I filled him up with tarry spunyarn, nailed sheet copper round him, bent some parts in the fire; and we are paying-in without more trouble now. You would think some one would praise ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... frustum of a cone, formed of heavy wood, placed upon a solid block of the same diameter, the contiguous surfaces of each being previously cut in notches or small grooves, and worked backwards and forwards horizontally by two handles or transverse arms; a spindle fixed in the centre of the lower cylinder serving as an axis to the upper or hollow one. Into this the grain is poured, and it is thus made to perform the office of the hopper at the same time with that of the upper, or movable stone, ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... even her wrath at the girl's insolence could wholly overcome her wonder. For an instant she stood entranced; then she tore the web across, and three times she touched Arachne's forehead with her spindle. ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott

... "Augustus was a freckle-faced, spindle-shanked little critter, with spectacles and a soft, polite way of speakin' that made you want to build a fire under him to see if he could swear like a Christian. He had a big head with consider'ble ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln

... little chambers where were the high beds, with their steps to be climbed. What a wilderness of feathers and patchwork! Some of Miss Becky's work was there. The bureaus nearly to ceilings, ornamented with round glass knobs, had their little mirrors perched up above my head. The candle stands, with spindle legs, wore an antediluvian look, and the chairs were just as queer. The more aspiring ones were prim in starched antimaccassars. Even the footstools belonged to a prehistoric age. There was nothing costly or elegant, ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... variegated family rags. They were handsome blue-bronze creatures, bare to the waist, with tight black astrakhan curls and firmly sculptured legs and ankles; and all around them, like a swarm of gnats, danced countless jolly pickaninnies, naked as lizards, with the spindle legs and globular stomachs of children fed ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... independent of their control. From their spindle hangs the life of all created things; whose end is predetermined even from the moment of their birth; and that law knows ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata

... before she knew, but, when she took away some of the figs and saw it, she said, "So here it is," and held out her bare arm to be bitten. Others say that it was kept in a vase, and that she vexed and pricked it with a golden spindle till it seized her arm. But what really took place is known to no one. Since it was also said that she carried poison in a hollow bodkin, about which she wound her hair; yet there was not so much as a spot found, or any symptom of poison upon her body, nor was the asp seen within ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... mountain, and but four or five feet wide, may be called so—Caper saw at the doors of the houses, standing chatting to each other, many old women, their white hair flying in every direction, who, as they talked, knitted stockings; or, with distaff in hand, twirled the spindle, making flax into thread for spinning, or wool into woof and web for weaving. Hearing a shuttle, he looked in at an open door, and found a young girl busily weaving a heavy blue cloth at a queer old loom; not far from her, an elderly woman was weaving ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... that she should be, as Gaule ('Select Cases of Conscience touching Witches,' &c., 1646) represents, an old woman with a wrinkled face, a furred brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, a scolding tongue, having a ragged coat on her back, a skull-cap on her head, a spindle in her hand, a dog or cat by her side. There are three sorts of the devil's agents on earth—the black, the gray, and the white witches. The first are omnipotent for evil, but powerless for good. The white have the power to help, but not to hurt.[91] As for the third species (a mixture ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams

... after their early, unfashionable dinner. It is full of old-time furniture, such as connoisseurs are searching after now—dark polished tables with great claws and little claws; high presses and cupboards brass bound and with numberless narrow drawers; spindle-legged chairs, with their worn embroidered backs and seats; a tall thin bookcase; a haircloth sofa with a griffin at either end mounting savage guard over an erect pillow; a thick hearth-rug; and two easy-chairs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various

... desperately, it seemed to me. 'Another picture, Smiles. Can you see a spindle-legged, mischievous boy of ten, who loved his little sister dearly; but teased her from morning until night. His name ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson

... couple of the small angle irons used for supporting shelves, and sold at about a penny each. These are screwed on to the board 2 inches from what may be considered to be the rear edge, and are so spaced as to leave room for a washer on each spindle between the roller and ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams

... spindle-legs yonder," was Peggy's amused answer. "They will be running at large for a long time yet. I don't even begin training them until they are a year old—at least not in anything but loving and obeying me. But most of them learn that very quickly. You must look ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson

... a complexion suggesting old sole leather; Greeks, with frilled petticoats; Romans, of course with the toga; Kabeles, with black hair and wearing a robe like a big gas-bag; Moors, with the Duke's nose and spindle shanks; Mohammedans, carrying bannocks with holes in them; and dragomans, with "bakshish" stamped on every department of their anatomy. But beneath the furtive glance and in the wicked eyes you see the cut-throat still lurking, awaiting the first opportunity to embark again in the ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne

... her conscience had long ago been pricked by her mother-in-law's spindle, and her whole moral sense infected with the belief that to keep house wisely was the end and aim of wifely duty. She reverenced Simeon for his learning and dignity, and felt proud that so simple a person as herself should have been chosen in ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various

... her feet, drawing long threads from a golden spindle, sat the queen's youngest child Atossa, born to her late in life. Cambyses was standing before her, and behind, hardly visible in the dim light, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... of five rooms, twenty minutes removed by Subway from the fish store; her bedroom, all pink and yellow maple; his; a kitchen, parlor, and dining room worked out happily in white-muslin curtains, spindle-legged parlor chairs, Henry's newfangled chifferobe and bed with a fine depth of mattress, and a kitchen with eight shining pots above the sink and a border of geese, cut out to the snip of Ann's own ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst

... application it would be necessary to pass the cutter through the ring in line with the gear axis. This would require a special or, at least, radically modified gear-cutting machine with a cutter arbor shorter than the inside diameter of the gear. Into this short space the spindle bearings and means of driving the spindle would have to be crowded, along with the cutter. Hopkins faced a problem similar to this in cutting the ring gear for his watch, except that the brass gear needed for the rotary ...
— The Auburndale Watch Company - First American Attempt Toward the Dollar Watch • Edwin A. Battison

... they were at work as usual, and Nora's hand was pausing on her spindle, and her eyes were fixed upon the narrow path leading through the Forest Valley, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... It is much easier to turn the latch of a door with the knob than with the spindle ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne

... has twisted, a pound of cotton into a thread two hundred and fifty miles long, beating Manchester by ninety miles, has no wheel, unless you so call a ball of clay, of the size of a pea, stuck fast on one end of her spindle, by means of which she twists it between her thumb and finger. But this wonderful mechanical feat costs her many months of labor, to say nothing of previous training; while the Manchester factory-girl, aided by the multiplying power of the wheel, easily makes as much yarn, though not quite ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... quite encrusted with carved wood; and here are the dirty little streets like crooked lanes, where old women, who all through the summer months, Sundays excepted, give their feet an air-bath, may be seen sitting on the doorsteps clutching with one bony hand the distaff and drowsily turning the spindle with ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... finished they went to the yard and they played on gansas and danced. Iwaginan took the skirts and gave one to Nagten-ngaeyan of Kapanikiyan and they danced. [152] When she danced she looked like the spindle. She did not go around, but always moving and the water from the river went up into the town and the striped fishes bit her heels. Not long after they stopped dancing and Gimbagonan was jealous and she said "Ala, give ...
— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole

... short, up to its own high and difficult standards. And along had come a ruck of stuff that was dark and dingy and old-fashioned; awkward articles with a vast dull expanse of mahogany, ending in clumsy claw feet; spindle-legged tables inlaid with white wood; old-fashioned mirrors in scarred gilt frames; awkward-looking highboys and the plainest of sofas and lounges. The chief sideboard boasted not the tiniest bit of brass; even the handles were of cheap glass, and Clem had set ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... birds symbolized conjugal fidelity. The ceremony was begun by sacrificing a sheep to Juno, the fleece being spread upon two chairs on which the bride and bridegroom sat: then a prayer was said over them. The young wife, carrying a distaff and spindle filled with wool, was conducted to her house, a cake, baked by the vestal virgins, being carried before her. The threshold of the house was disenchanted by charms, and by annointing it with certain unctuous perfumes; but as it was considered ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier

... steady: it should be at least three quarters of a yard in girth at bottom, and taper gradually to the top to half that size. An iron rim is to be driven on the head of the pole to keep it from splitting, and then a spindle at least an inch in diameter, with a shoulder, is to be fixed in it; an iron wheel with four spokes turned up at the end like a hook, to which four ropes are to be fastened, must then be made to revolve on the spindle. As the ropes reach ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin

... was generally to be found spinning at her muckle wheel, retiring and advancing to the music of its cheerful hum, the while her spun thread was rapidly coiled up on the spindle. The others, as they busied themselves in their household duties, or brightened up the delf and pewter, and set it out on the shelf to its best advantage, would join in some plaintive Scotch ballad, with such good taste and skill ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede

... earliest to their latest stage. The President then explained, by means of an admirable series of illustrations projected upon a screen by the oxyhydrogen lantern, the life history of the organism to which he had referred, exhibiting it first as a translucent, elliptic, spindle-shaped body, with six long and delicate flagella, the various positions in which the five specimens were drawn giving a very good idea ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various

... equal our Paris in dancing, and danced for us the adventures of Leda, during which he sweated and caught cold. He was as wet and slippery as an eel freshly taken from water. He changed masks one after another, whirled like a spindle, waved his hands like a drunken sailor, till disgust seized me while looking at that great stomach and those slim legs. Paris taught him during two weeks; but imagine to thyself Ahenobarbus as Leda or as the divine swan. That was a swan!—there ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... the kind called by the boys a box-trap. It is in the form of a box, and the back part runs up high, to a point. The lid of the box has a string fastened to it, which string is carried up, over the high point, and thence down, and is fastened to an apparatus connected with the spindle. ...
— Stuyvesant - A Franconia Story • Jacob Abbott

... into the drawing-room in good time; she could look about her, and learn how to feel at home in her new quarters. The room was forty-feet long or so, fitted up with yellow satin at some distant period; high spindle-legged chairs and pembroke- tables abounded. The carpet was of the same date as the curtains, and was threadbare in many places; and in others was covered with drugget. Stands of plants, great jars of flowers, old Indian china and cabinets gave the room the pleasant aspect it certainly ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... upstairs for her afternoon siesta, and soon fell asleep on the cool chintz lounge, in her shaded room, where the old-fashioned furniture, high bedstead, spindle-legged chairs, and antique toilet-table, had remained unchanged from her youth, when the oval mirror reflected back a merry, rosy girl-face, instead ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March

... tall, stooping, lantern-jawed, asthmatic-voiced, spindle-shanked fellow.' Here he put his foot on the rail of my chair, and slightly scratched the calf of his leg. 'Hair the color of a cock-canary,' thrusting his fingers through his own coal-black ringlets; 'with light blue eyes, Sir, trimmed with pink gymp. He hasn't been ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various

... in a primitive state of nakedness, lay sprawling, as if to be crushed by the hoofs of the first passing horse. Occasionally, indeed, when such a consummation seemed inevitable, a watchful old grandam, with her close cap, distaff, and spindle, rushed like a sibyl in frenzy out of one of these miserable cells, dashed into the middle of the path, and snatching up her own charge from among the sunburnt loiterers, saluted him with a sound cuff, and transported him back to his ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... unhappy maidens neither to give indulgence to love, nor to wash away cares with delicious wine; or to be dispirited out of dread of the lashes of an uncle's tongue. The winged boy of Venus, O Neobule, has deprived you of your spindle and your webs, and the beauty of Hebrus from Lipara of inclination for the labors of industrious Minerva, after he has bathed his anointed shoulders in the waters of the Tiber; a better horseman than Bellerophon himself, neither conquered at boxing, nor by want of swiftness in the race: he ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace

... on her left arm, busily occupied in repairing the ravages of tear and wear upon that useful though humble garment. The two young ladies spun, as used to do the great ladies of the court of King Alfred, and as Hercules himself is said to have done when he changed his club and lion's skin for a spindle and distaff with the Queen of Lybia; Jack was apparently sketching, Fritz had a collection of hunting apparatus before him, and the other two young men, each with a book, were deeply ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien

... spiculate[obs3], set, strop, grind; chip [flint]. cut &c. (sunder) 44. Adj. sharp, keen; acute; acicular, aciform[obs3]; aculeated[obs3], acuminated[obs3]; pointed; tapering; conical, pyramidal; mucronate[obs3], mucronated[obs3]; spindle shaped, needle shaped; spiked, spiky, ensiform[obs3], peaked, salient; cusped, cuspidate, cuspidated[obs3]; cornute[obs3], cornuted[obs3], cornicultate[obs3]; prickly; spiny, spinous[obs3], spicular; thorny, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... believed, this success of Goransson's was wholly due to his ore being "totally free from phosphorous and sulphur."[67] However, Bessemer's own progress was substantial, for his Sheffield works were reported as being in active operation in April 1859, and a price for his engineers' tool and spindle steel was included in the Mining Journal "Mining Market" weekly quotations for the first ...
— The Beginnings of Cheap Steel • Philip W. Bishop

... fixed to the frame in its axis, and slide through a point B fixed in the carriage AA'. Along it a block K can slide. On the back edge F3F4 of the frame another carriage C travels. It holds a vertical spindle with the knife-edge wheel at the bottom. At right angles to the plane of the wheel, the spindle has an arm GH, which is kept parallel to a [v.04 p.0980] similar arm attached to K perpendicular to DB. The plane of the knife-edge wheel r is therefore ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... cursed More than enough, when thou didst fashion me To be a type of ugliness,—a thing By whose comparison all Rimini Holds itself beautiful? Lo! here I stand, A gnarled, blighted trunk! There's not a knave So spindle-shanked, so wry-faced, so infirm, Who looks at me, and smiles not on himself. And I have friends to pity me—great Heaven! One has a favourite leg that he bewails,— Another sees my hip with doleful plaints,— ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker

... forward with ineffable longing towards the angel about to award him the crown of the blessed; in all these positions he is heroically beautiful. We meet him again, unmistakable, but how different, in the realistic group of the "Thunder-stricken "—the long, lank youth, with spindle-shanks and egg-shaped body, bounding forward, with most grotesque strides, over the uncouth heap of dead bodies, ungainly masses with soles and nostrils uppermost, lying in beast-like confusion. This youth, with something of a harlequin in his jumps and ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... Orthia the sanguinary, Hymnia of Orchomena, the Saphria of the Patraeans, Aphia of AEgina, Bendis of Thrace, and Stymphalia with the leg of a bird. Triopas, in place of three eyeballs, has nothing more than three orbits. Erichthonius, with spindle-shanks, crawls like ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert

... the strange stories and strange things told me, I should have liked particularly to chronicle two at length. One is the story of a tiny Indian spindle that spun by itself in the dust, and the other, though it had no marvel in it, except the marvel of maternal feeling, is the story of a chamois and her young one on a glacier-pass. The English mountaineer who told it me, was on a difficult ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... said Fernand, eager to get the fighter out of view of the rest of the little crowd. He drew Ronicky and Jerry Smith into a little apartment which opened off the hall. It was furnished with an almost feminine delicacy of style, with wide-seated, spindle-legged Louis XV. chairs and a couch covered with rich brocade. The desk was a work of Boulle. A small tapestry of the Gobelins made a ragged glow of color on the wall. Frederic Fernand had recreated an ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand

... unrighteous judgement. And the host were all wearied and Night came on them, Night that puts to rest the works of men, and lulled all the earth to sleep; but to the maid no sleep brought rest, but in her bosom her heart was wrung with anguish. Even as when a toiling woman turns her spindle through the night, and round her moan her orphan children, for she is a widow, and down her cheeks fall the tears, as she bethinks her how dreary a lot hath seized her; so Medea's cheeks were wet; and her heart within her was in agony, pierced ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius

... dark winding passages of many steps—even the huge pear-shaped lintel, which had stretched over its little door, and which, according to tradition, a great Fingalian lady had once thrown across the Dornoch Firth from off the point of her spindle—had all disappeared, and I saw instead, only a dry-stone wall. The men of the present generation do certainly live in a most enlightened age—an age in which every trace of the barbarism of our early ancestors is fast disappearing; and were we but more zealous in immortalizing ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... together, and roll them up in balls. These "rope-yarns'' are constantly used for various purposes, but the greater part is manufactured into spun-yarn. For this purpose, every vessel is furnished with a "spun-yarn winch''; which is very simple, consisting of a wheel and spindle. This may be heard constantly going on deck in pleasant weather; and we had employment, during a great part of the time, for three hands, in drawing and knotting ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... not been asked to the feast she was very angry, and scolded the king and queen very much, and set to work to take her revenge. So she cried out, 'The king's daughter shall, in her fifteenth year, be wounded by a spindle, and fall down dead.' Then the twelfth of the friendly fairies, who had not yet given her gift, came forward, and said that the evil wish must be fulfilled, but that she could soften its mischief; so her gift was, that the king's daughter, when the spindle wounded her, should not really ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm

... horse by means of a bridle hung over her arm. Her hands, being thus not required either for the horse or for the vessel, were employed in spinning, as she walked along, by means of a distaff and spindle. ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... a devilish thing it is, for a Woman to be obliged to go to bed to a spindle-shanked young Squire, she doth not like, when there is a jolly Parson in the same House ...
— An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews • Conny Keyber

... the young human being can be readily discriminated from that of the young puppy; but, at a tolerably early period, the two become distinguishable by the different form of their adjuncts, the yelk-sac and the allantois. The former, in the Dog, becomes long and spindle-shaped, while in Man it remains spherical; the latter, in the Dog, attains an extremely large size, and the vascular processes which are developed from it and eventually give rise to the formation of the ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley

... hand to give his old friend and master his best assistance. We have seen many original letters from Watt to Murdock, asking for counsel and help. In one of these, written in 1808, Watt says: "I have revived an idea which, if it answers, will supersede the frame and upright spindle of the reducing machine, but more of this when we meet. Meanwhile it will be proper to adhere to the frame, etc., at present, until we see how the other alterations answer." In another he says: "I have done a Cicero without any plaits—the different segments meeting exactly. ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... frost. Half the joy, for instance, of shooting, in which I frankly confess I take a childish delight, is the quiet tramping over the clean-cut stubble, the distant view of field and wood, the long, quiet wait at the covert-end, where the spindle-wood hangs out her quaint rosy berries, and the rabbits come scampering up the copse, as the far-off tapping of the beaters draws near in the frosty air. The delights of the country-side grow upon me every month and every year. I love ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson

... This was sometimes done on the old high wheel, which was whirled around by hand and then allowed to come to rest while another section of the cotton, wool, or flax was drawn from the carded mass by hand, then whirled again, twisting this thread and winding it up on the spindle, and so on. Or it was done by the low wheel, which was kept whirling continuously by the use of a treadle worked by the foot, while the material was being drawn out all the time by the two hands, and twisted and wound continuously by the horseshoe-shaped ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney

... and waves, breaking out into curls let her braid and twist it as she would—brown when she sat by me at her sewing-work in the morning, and shining out like gold when the sun lay in the porch. I wish you could a-seen her as she was drawing out her thread of woolen yarn, and running it up on the spindle as bright and ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens

... said his uncle. "One would think you were your grandfather, Evan Callendar, and that some English red-coat had trod on your tartan. Hout! What's the use o' a temper like that to folk wha hae taken to the spindle ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... journey from the capital in that direction, sufficient horses were bred to supply the wants of the whole country. That seemed perfectly possible, considering how limited is the demand in this respect; but, on our homeward journey, we passed a drove of upwards of two hundred long- backed, spindle-legged colts, going up to Katmandu, and that did not seem exactly ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant

... with thee, and look to it That thou bringst me what I ask: Gowns of costly stuff, Earrings, chains, and veils; A house with many windows; Mortars, lounges, sieves, Baskets, kettles, pots, Glasses, settles, brooms, Beakers, closets, flasks, Shovels, basins, bowls, Spindle, distaff, blankets, Buckets, ewers, barrels, Skillets, forks, and knives; Vinaigrettes and mirrors; Kerchiefs, turbans, reticules, Crescents, amulets, Rings and jewelled clasps; Girdles, buckles, bodices, Kirtles, caps, and waists; Garments finely spun, Rare byssus from the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... fought, and him defied, Two mighty blows she gave the Turk untrue, One cleft his shield, the other pierced his side; The prince the damsel by her habit knew, "See, see this mankind strumpet, see," he cried, "This shameless whore, for thee fit weapons were Thy neeld and spindle, not a sword ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... to two inches high, thick, solid, pale yellow above, white below, granulated. The spores are spindle-shaped, rusty-yellow. ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard

... fish-pond all is still, no flocks grazing on the shore, no picturesque groups, no songs. The spinning-wheel no longer whirls, the hand of the queen no longer turns the spindle; she has learned to hold the sceptre and the pen, and to weave public policy, and not a net of linen. The trees with their variegated autumn foliage are reflected in the dark water of the pond; some weeping-willows droop with their tapering branches down to the water, and a few ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach

... a cozy little spot, nestled down into the valley of a small stream, half creek and half river, that formed a cataract in the neighborhood and gave it the name. Factories clustered along the stream, making the idle water labor for the benefit of man, and within them whirred the spindle of the cotton or wool spinner and clanked the hammer of the worker in iron and steel. The village itself lay partly in the valley, along the east margin of the stream, and partly climbing the slight range of hills that bounded it still farther eastward. A wilderness of shade-trees bordered ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford

... pair walked around the altar hand in hand, received the congratulations of their friends, and the bride, taken with apparent force from the arms of her mother, as the Sabine women were taken in the days of Romulus, was conducted to her new home carrying a distaff and a spindle, emblems of the industry that was thought necessary in the household work that she was to perform or direct. Strong men lifted her over the threshold, lest her foot should trip upon it, and her husband saluted her with fire ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman

... excess Have so defiled me, e'en before my birth, That heaven and fortune frown upon me thus? Wherein have I offended, as a child, When we of evil deeds are ignorant, That thus disfigured, of the bloom of youth Bereft, my little thread of life has from The spindle of the unrelenting Fate Been drawn? Alas, incautious are thy words! Mysterious counsels all events control, And all, except our grief, is mystery. Deserted children, we were born to weep; But why, is known to those above, alone. O vain the cares, the hopes of earlier years! To idle shows ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi

... to cover me now, poor creature that I am!' cried the young woman, and transformed herself first into a distaff, then into a wooden beetle, then into a spindle, and into all imaginable shapes. But all these shapes the King's son went on destroying till she stood before him in ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various

... carried me back to the pioneer days of Ohio. A little girl of five or six years stole up to the wheel when the mother's back was turned, and tried her skill on a roll. How proud and delighted she was when she had spun the wool into a long, uneven thread, and secured it safely on the spindle. Surely, the child of the palace, reared in the lap of luxury and with her hands in the mother's jewel-box, could not have been happier or ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty

... of the crowd, and now slowly working towards the cross, was a banner on a high-raised cross-pole, a picture of a man and woman half-clad in skins of beasts seen against a background of green trees, the man holding a spade and the woman a distaff and spindle rudely done enough, but yet with a certain spirit and much meaning; and underneath this symbol of the early world and man's first contest with ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris

... the high is adjustable; of course, in this case, the position of the quadrants must be only changed for reversing. In arranging the independent cut-off on the Joy gear, it is only necessary to increase the length of the vibrating link beyond the point of attachment for the main valve spindle connection to obtain a point from which motion may be taken to actuate the cut-off valve; even then the cost of the Joy gear for both cylinders is but little more than for a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various

... is told "to get the fig-leaves ready." Then Lucifer is ordered to "come out of the serpent and creep on his belly to hell;" Adam and Eve receive the curse, and depart out of Paradise, "showing a spindle and distaff"—no badly-conceived emblem of the labour to which they are henceforth doomed. And thus the second ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins

... By your Uccellatojo, which surpassed Shall in its downfall be as in its rise. Bellincion Berti saw I go begirt With leather and with bone, and from the mirror His dame depart without a painted face; And him of Nerli saw, and him of Vecchio, Contented with their simple suits of buff, And with the spindle and the flax their dames. O fortunate women! and each one was certain Of her own burial-place, and none as yet For sake of France was in her bed deserted. One o'er the cradle kept her studious watch, And in her lullaby the language ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various

... unceasing. 310 Each in her left upheld with soft fleece clothed a distaff, Then did the right that drew forth thread with upturn of fingers Gently fashion the yarn which deftly twisted by thumb-ball Speeded the spindle poised by thread-whorl perfect of polish; Thus as the work was wrought, the lengths were trimmed wi' the fore-teeth, 315 While to their thin, dry lips stuck wool-flecks severed by biting, Which at the first ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... unfavourable comment at Newmarket. Their 'points' are undoubtedly coarse and clumsy: their heads are big, thick, stupid, and ungainly; their manes are bushy and ill-defined; their legs are distinctly feeble and spindle-shaped; their tails more closely resemble the tail of the domestic pig than that of the noble animal beloved with a love passing the love of women by the English aristocracy. Nevertheless there is little (if any) reason to doubt that my very old ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... held ten harvests, spacious cellars for the wine-vats and corresponding wine-presses; now the master keeps flocks of peacocks, and causes his doors to be inlaid with African cypress-wood.—Formerly the housewife turned the spindle with the hand and kept at the same time the pot on the hearth in her eye, that the pottage might not be singed; now," it is said in another satire, "the daughter begs her father for a pound of precious stones, and the wife her husband for a bushel of pearls.—Formerly ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... is called a Maxwell disc, and is nothing more than a circle of firm cardboard, pierced with a central hole to fit the spindle of a rotary motor, and with a radial slit from rim to centre, so that another disc may be slid over the first to cover any desired fraction of its surface. Let us paint one of these discs with Venetian red and the other with viridian and cobalt, ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell

... and glowing ashes and red-hot iron was on the ground. At a little distance lay a flat iron disc, called the "platform"; with a pole in the centre through which ran a spindle. On this metal plate lay a new cast wheel, and the wright with a bar screwed a nut so as to hold the cart-wheel down ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

... "Black spindle-legs curled up to meet red-gimleted black faces, donkeys headless and legless, or sieves of shrapnel; camels with necks writhed back on to their humps, rotting already in pools of blood and bile-yellow water, heads without faces, and faces ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens

... the stamens, each shorter than the incurved horn within. Stem: 1 to 2 1/2 ft. tall, simple or sparingly branched, hairy, leafy to summit, containing milky juice. Leaves: In upright groups, very narrow, almost thread-like, from 3 to 7 in each whorl. Fruit: 2 smooth, narrow, spindle-shaped, upright pods, the seeds attached to silky fluff; 1 pod usually abortive. Preferred Habitat - Dry fields, hills, uplands. Flowering Season - July-September. Distribution - Maine and far westward, south to ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... wife, and weel mat she be, That busks her fause rock wi' the lint o' the lee (lie), Whirling her spindle and twisting the twine, Wynds aye the richt ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... silently through the orange soup, though there was really no way to tell it was moving now—until a skewy spindle shape loomed up ahead and shot back over the viewport. I think it was a vulture. I don't know how vultures manage to operate in the haze, which ought to cancel their keen eyesight, but they do. ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... said she. "Hear, then, my wish. On the day when she reaches her fifteenth birthday, the Princess shall prick her finger with the spindle of a spinning-wheel, and ...
— The Sleeping Beauty • C. S. Evans

... Englishman, Sir George Cayley, and it was in 1809 that he described his project in detail in Nicholson's Journal.... His idea embodied 'everything'—the wings forming an oblique sail, the empennage, the spindle forms to diminish resistance, the screw-propeller, the 'explosion' motor,... he even described a means of securing automatic stability. Is not all that marvellous, and does it not constitute a complete specification for ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton

... battle," said he, "by the sword or shot of a brave Englishman, but never by a thrust from a spit in the hands of a spindle-shanked Frenchman! Dismiss all fears on my account; I will give this 'PARLEZ-VOUS FRANCAIS' a lesson in fighting ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper

... evening from her labor in the fields, carrying a fat, heavy baby, a clumsy hoe not much lighter than the youngster, and an earthenware water-pitcher, and, at the same time, industriously spinning wool with a small hand-spindle. And yet some people argue about the impossibility of doing two things at once. Whether these poor women have been hoeing potatoes, carrying the infant, and spinning wool at the same time all day I am unable to say, not having been an eye-witness, though I really should not ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... scarcely any education in spite of her boudoir experience. Her brain was prompted by her senses, her kindness was the impulsive warm-heartedness of girls of her class. But who could trouble over Coralie's psychology when his eyes were dazzled by those smooth, round arms of hers, the spindle-shaped fingers, the fair white shoulders, and breast celebrated in the Song of Songs, the flexible curving lines of throat, the graciously moulded outlines beneath the scarlet silk stockings? And this beauty, worthy of an Eastern poet, was brought into relief by the conventional ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... deceptions. See Guido Bonatti,[3] see Asdente,[4] who now would wish he had attended to his leather and his thread, but late repents. See the forlorn women who left the needle, the spool, and the spindle, and became fortune-tellers; they wrought spells with herb ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri

... scenery. Ranges of hills occupy both sides of our path, and the fine level road is adorned with a beautiful red flower named Bolcamaria. The markets or sleeping-places are well supplied with provisions by great numbers of women, every one of whom is seen spinning cotton with a spindle and distaff, exactly like those which were in use among the ancient Egyptians. A woman is scarcely ever seen going to the fields, though with a pot on her head, a child on her back, and the hoe over her shoulder, but she is employed in this way. The cotton was brought to the market for ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... in all Hesperia, fed The turning spindle with the twisting thread; The woof, the shuttle follow'd her command, Till various garments grew beneath her hand. And now, while all her thoughts with Capac rove Thro former scenes of innocence ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow



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